Transcript
00:00:00 I believe our official scientific worldview is incompatible with the reality of consciousness.
00:00:05 Do you think we’re living in a simulation?
00:00:06 We could be in the matrix, this could be a very vivid dream.
00:00:09 There’s going to be a few people that are now visualizing a pink elephant.
00:00:12 A hamster has consciousness.
00:00:14 Except for cats who are evil automatons that are void of consciousness.
00:00:18 Consciousness is the basis of moral value, moral concern.
00:00:23 Do you think there will be a time in like 20, 30, 50 years when we’re not morally okay turning off the power to a robot?
00:00:36 The following is a conversation with Philip Goff.
00:00:38 Philosopher specializing in the philosophy of mind and consciousness.
00:00:43 He is a panpsychist, which means he believes that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous
00:00:49 feature of physical reality, of all matter in the universe.
00:00:54 He is the author of Galileo’s Error, Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness,
00:00:59 and is the host of an excellent podcast called Mind Chat.
00:01:04 This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.
00:01:06 To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.
00:01:09 And now, here’s my conversation with Philip Goff.
00:01:14 I opened my second podcast conversation with Elon Musk.
00:01:18 With a question about consciousness and panpsychism.
00:01:22 The question was, quote, does consciousness permeate all matter?
00:01:27 I don’t know why I opened the conversation this way.
00:01:29 He looked at me like, what the hell is this guy talking about?
00:01:31 So he said no, because we wouldn’t be able to tell if it did or not.
00:01:36 So it’s outside the realm of the scientific method.
00:01:39 Do you agree or disagree with Elon Musk’s answer?
00:01:45 I disagree, I guess I do think consciousness pervades matter.
00:01:50 In fact, I think consciousness is the ultimate nature of matter.
00:01:56 So as for whether it’s outside of the scientific method, I think there’s a fundamental challenge
00:02:06 at the heart of the science of consciousness that we need to face up to, which is that
00:02:12 consciousness is not publicly observable.
00:02:15 I can’t look inside your head and see your feelings and experiences.
00:02:21 We know about consciousness not from doing experiments or public observation.
00:02:27 We just know about it from our immediate awareness of our feelings and experiences.
00:02:33 It’s qualitative, not quantitative, as you talk about.
00:02:37 Yeah, that’s another aspect of it.
00:02:38 So there are a couple of reasons consciousness, I think, is not fully susceptible to the standard
00:02:48 scientific approach.
00:02:50 One reason you’ve just raised is that it’s qualitative rather than quantitative.
00:02:54 Another reason is it’s not publicly observable.
00:02:57 So science is used to dealing with unobservables, fundamental particles, quantum wave functions,
00:03:06 other universes, none of these things are observable.
00:03:10 But there’s an important difference.
00:03:12 With all these things, we postulate unobservables in order to explain what we can observe.
00:03:20 In the whole of science, that’s how it works.
00:03:25 In the case of consciousness, in the unique case of consciousness, the thing we are trying
00:03:31 to explain is not publicly observable.
00:03:34 And that is utterly unique.
00:03:37 If we want to fully bring science into consciousness, we need a more expansive conception of the
00:03:42 scientific method.
00:03:43 So it doesn’t mean we can’t explain consciousness scientifically, but we need to rethink what
00:03:48 science is.
00:03:49 What do you mean publicly, the word publicly observable?
00:03:52 Is there something interesting to be said about the word publicly?
00:03:55 I suppose versus privately.
00:03:56 Yeah, it’s tricky to define, but I suppose the data of physics are available to anybody.
00:04:06 If there were aliens who visited us from another planet, maybe they’d have very different sense
00:04:11 organs.
00:04:12 Maybe they’d struggle to understand our art or our music.
00:04:17 But if they were intelligent enough to do mathematics, they could understand our physics.
00:04:22 They could look at the data of our experiments.
00:04:25 They could run the experiments themselves.
00:04:28 Whereas consciousness, is it observable?
00:04:31 Is it not observable?
00:04:31 In a sense, it’s observable.
00:04:33 As you say, we could say it’s privately observable.
00:04:37 I am directly aware of my own feelings and experiences.
00:04:41 If I’m in pain, it’s just right there for me.
00:04:45 My pain is just totally directly evident to me.
00:04:49 But you from the outside cannot directly access my pain.
00:04:54 You can access my pain behavior, or you can ask me, but you can’t access my pain in the
00:05:02 way that I can access my pain.
00:05:06 So I think that’s a distinction.
00:05:09 It might be difficult to totally pin it down how we define those things, but I think there’s
00:05:14 a fairly clear and very important difference there.
00:05:17 So you think there’s a kind of direct observation that you’re able to do of your pain that I’m
00:05:23 not.
00:05:23 So my observation, all the ways in which I can sneak up to observing your pain is indirect
00:05:31 versus yours is direct.
00:05:32 Can you play devil’s advocate?
00:05:34 Is it possible for me to get closer and closer and closer to being able to observe your pain,
00:05:42 like all the subjective experiences, yours in the way that you do?
00:05:49 Yeah.
00:05:50 I mean, so of course, it’s not that we observe behavior and then we make an inference.
00:05:56 We are hardwired to instinctively interpret smiles as happiness, crying as sadness.
00:06:06 And as we get to know someone, we find it very easy to adopt their perspective, get
00:06:11 into their shoes.
00:06:12 But strictly speaking, all we have perceptual access to is someone’s behavior.
00:06:20 And if you were just, strictly speaking, if you were trying to explain someone’s behavior,
00:06:28 those aspects that are publicly observable, I don’t think you’d ever have recourse to
00:06:33 attribute consciousness.
00:06:34 You could just postulate some kind of mechanism if you were just trying to explain the behavior.
00:06:39 So someone like Daniel Dennett is very consistent on this.
00:06:44 So I think for most people, what science is in the business of is explaining the data
00:06:53 of public observation experiment.
00:06:55 If you religiously followed that, you would not postulate consciousness because it’s not
00:07:02 a datum that’s known about in that way.
00:07:04 And Daniel Dennett is really consistent on this.
00:07:06 He thinks my consciousness cannot be empirically verified and therefore it doesn’t exist.
00:07:13 Dennett is consistent on this.
00:07:14 I think I’m consistent on this.
00:07:16 But I think a lot of people have a slightly confused middle way position on this.
00:07:22 On the one hand, they think the business of science is just to account for public observation
00:07:31 experiment, but on the other hand, they also believe in consciousness without appreciating,
00:07:38 I think, that that implies that there is another datum over and above the data of public observation
00:07:45 experiments, namely just the reality of feelings and experiences.
00:07:49 As we walk along this conversation, you keep opening doors that I don’t want to walk into
00:07:52 and I will, but I want to try to stay kind of focused.
00:07:56 You mentioned Daniel Dennett, let’s lay it out since he sticks to his story, pun unintended,
00:08:03 and then you stick to yours.
00:08:05 What is your story?
00:08:06 What is your theory of consciousness versus his?
00:08:09 Can you clarify his position?
00:08:12 So my view, I defend the view known as panpsychism, which is the view that consciousness is a
00:08:20 fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the physical world.
00:08:23 So it doesn’t literally mean that everything is conscious despite the meaning of the word
00:08:29 pan, everything, psyche, mind, so literally that means everything has mind, but the typical
00:08:36 commitment of the panpsychist is that the fundamental building blocks of reality, maybe
00:08:43 fundamental particles like electrons and quarks, have incredibly simple forms of experience
00:08:50 and that the very complex experience of the human or animal brain is somehow rooted in
00:08:57 or derived from this much more simple consciousness at the level of fundamental physics.
00:09:03 So I mean that’s a theory that I would justify on the grounds that it can account for this
00:09:12 datum of consciousness that we are immediately aware of in our experience in a way that I
00:09:18 don’t think other theories can. If you asked me to contrast that to Daniel Dennett, I think
00:09:22 he would just say there is no such datum. Dennett says the data for science of consciousness
00:09:27 is what he calls heterophenomenology, which is specifically defined as what we can access
00:09:34 from the third person perspective, including what people say, but crucially, we’re not
00:09:40 treating what they say. We’re not relying on their testimony as evidence for some
00:09:46 unobservable realm of feelings and experiences. We’re just treating what they say as a datum
00:09:54 of public observation experiments that we can account for in terms of underlying mechanisms.
00:09:59 But I feel like there’s a deeper view of what consciousness is. So you have a very clear,
00:10:04 and we’ll talk quite a bit about panpsychism, but you have a clear view of what, you know,
00:10:10 almost like a physics view of consciousness. He, I think, has a kind of unique view of
00:10:16 you that consciousness is almost a side effect of this massively parallel computation system
00:10:25 going on in our brain, that the brain has a model of the world and it’s taking in perceptions
00:10:34 and it’s constantly weaving multiple stories about that world that’s integrating the new
00:10:39 perceptions and the multiple stories are somehow, it’s like a Google doc, collaborative editing,
00:10:46 and that collaborative editing is the actual experience of what we think of as consciousness.
00:10:54 Somehow the editing is consciousness of this, of this story. I mean, that’s a theory of
00:11:01 consciousness, isn’t it? The narrative theory of consciousness or the multiple versions
00:11:08 editing, collaborative editing of a narrative theory of consciousness.
00:11:12 Yeah, he calls it the multiple drafts model. Incidentally, there’s a very interesting paper
00:11:16 just come out by very good philosopher Luke Roloff’s defending a panpsychist version
00:11:22 of Dennett’s multiple drafts model.
00:11:26 Like a deeper turtle that that turtle is stacked on top of.
00:11:28 Just the difference being that this is Luke Roloff’s view, all of the drafts are conscious.
00:11:33 So I guess for Dennett, there’s sort of no fact of the matter about which of these drafts
00:11:42 is the correct one. On Roloff’s view, maybe there’s no fact of the matter about which
00:11:47 of these drafts is my consciousness, but nonetheless, all the drafts correspond to
00:11:53 some consciousness. And I mean, it just sounds kind of funny. I guess I think he calls it
00:11:58 Dennettian panpsychism. But Luke is one of the most rigorous and serious philosophers
00:12:05 alive at the moment, I think. And I hate having Luke Roloff’s in an audience if I’m giving a
00:12:09 talk because he always cuts straight to the weakness in your position that you hadn’t
00:12:14 thought of. And so it’s nice, panpsychism is sometimes associated with fluffy thinking,
00:12:18 but contemporary panpsychists have come out of this tradition we call analytic philosophy,
00:12:24 which is rooted in detailed, rigorous argumentation. And it is defended in that manner.
00:12:34 Yeah. Those analytic philosophers are sticklers for terminology. It’s very fun,
00:12:38 very fun group to talk shit with.
00:12:40 Yeah. Well, I mean, it gets boring if you just start and end defining words, right?
00:12:45 Yeah.
00:12:46 I think starting with defining words is good. Actually, the philosopher Derek Parfitt said
00:12:49 when he first was thinking about philosophy, he went to a talk in analytic philosophy,
00:12:56 and he went to a talk in continental philosophy, and he decided that the problem with the
00:13:00 continental philosophy, if it was really unrigorous, really imprecise, the problem
00:13:04 with the analytic philosophy is it was just not about anything important. And he thought
00:13:10 there was more chance of working within analytic philosophy and asking some more meaningful,
00:13:15 some more profound questions than there was in working in continental philosophy and making it
00:13:19 more rigorous. Now, they’re both horrific stereotypes, and I don’t want to get nasty
00:13:23 emails from either of these groups, but there’s something to what he was saying there.
00:13:28 I think just a tiny tangent on terminology. I do think that there’s a lot of deep
00:13:35 insight to be discovered by just asking questions. What do we mean by this word?
00:13:40 I remember I was taking a course on algorithms and data structures in computer science,
00:13:45 and the instructor, shout out to him, Ali Chakrafande, amazing professor, I remember
00:13:51 he asked some basic questions like, what is an algorithm? The pressure of pushing students to
00:13:57 answer, to think deeply, you know, you just woke up hungover in college or whatever,
00:14:02 and you’re tasked with answering some deep philosophical question about what is an
00:14:05 algorithm? These basic questions, and they sound very simple, but they’re actually very difficult.
00:14:11 And one of the things I really value in conversation is asking these dumb, simple
00:14:16 questions of like, you know, what is intelligence? And just continually asking that question over and
00:14:23 over of some of the sort of biggest research in the researchers in the artificial intelligence
00:14:29 computer science space is actually very useful. At the same time, you know, it should start a
00:14:34 terminology and then progress where you kind of say, fuck it, we’ll just assume we know what we
00:14:41 mean by that. Otherwise, you get the Bill Clinton situation where it’s like, what is the meaning of
00:14:47 is, is whatever he said, it’s like, hey, man, did you do the sex stuff or not? Yeah. So there’s,
00:14:56 you have to both be able to talk about the sex stuff and the meaning of the word is.
00:15:01 With consciousness, because we don’t currently understand, you know, very much terminology
00:15:09 discussions are very important because it’s like you’re almost trying to sneak, sneak up to some
00:15:16 deep insight by just discussing some basic terminology, you know, like what is consciousness
00:15:22 or even defining the different aspects of panpsychism is fascinating. But just to linger
00:15:29 on the Daniel Dennett thing, what do you think about narrative, sort of the mind constructing
00:15:40 narratives for ourselves? So there’s nothing special about consciousness deeply. It is some
00:15:47 property of the human mind that’s just is able to tell these pretty stories that we experience as
00:15:56 consciousness and that it’s unique perhaps to the human mind, which is, I suppose, what Daniel
00:16:01 Dennett would argue that it’s either deeply unique or mostly unique to the human mind.
00:16:08 It’s just on the question of terminology before. Yes, I think it used to be the fashion among
00:16:15 philosophers that we had to come up with utterly precise, necessary and sufficient conditions for
00:16:21 each word. And then I think this has gone out of fashion a bit, partly because it’s just been,
00:16:28 you know, such a failure. The word knowledge in particular, people used to define knowledge as
00:16:34 true justified belief. And then this guy Gettier had this very short paper where he just produced
00:16:40 some pretty conclusive counter examples to that. I think, you know, he wrote very few papers,
00:16:44 but this is just, you know, you have to teach this on an undergraduate philosophy course.
00:16:49 And then after that, you had a huge literature of people trying to address this and propose a
00:16:55 new definition, but then someone else would come out with counter examples and then you get a new
00:16:59 definition of knowledge and counter examples and it just went on and on and never seemed to get
00:17:02 anywhere. So I think the thought now is let’s work out how precise we need to be for what we’re
00:17:08 trying to do. And I think that’s a healthier attitude. So precision is important, but you
00:17:12 just need to work out how precise do we need to be for these purposes. Coming to Dennett and
00:17:19 narrative theories, I mean, I think narrative theories are a plausible contender for a theory
00:17:28 of the self, theory of my identity over time, what makes me the same person in some sense today as I
00:17:38 was 20 years ago, given that I’ve changed so much physically and psychologically. One running
00:17:45 contender is something connected to the kind of stories we tell about ourselves or maybe some
00:17:52 story about the psychological, the chains of psychological continuity. I’m not saying I accept
00:17:57 such a theory, but it’s plausible. I don’t think these theories are good as theories of consciousness,
00:18:05 at least if we’re taking consciousness just to be subjective experience, pleasure, pain, seeing
00:18:12 color, hearing sound. I think a hamster has consciousness in that sense. There’s something
00:18:20 that it’s like to be a hamster. It feels pain if you stand on it. If you’re cruel enough to do,
00:18:26 I don’t know why I gave that. People always give, I don’t know, philosophers give these very violent
00:18:31 examples to get the cross consciousness and it’s, yeah, I don’t know why that’s coming
00:18:34 about, but anyway. You say mean things to the hamster. It experiences pain, it experiences
00:18:43 pleasure, joy. I mean, but there’s some limits to that experience of a hamster,
00:18:48 but there is nevertheless the presence of a subjective experience. Yeah. Consciousness is
00:18:53 just something, I mean, it’s a very ambiguous word, but if we’re just using it to mean some
00:18:57 kind of experience, some kind of inner life, that is pretty widespread in the animal kingdom.
00:19:03 A bit difficult to say where it stops, where it starts, but you certainly don’t need something
00:19:09 as sophisticated as the capacity to self consciously tell stories about yourself to just
00:19:15 have experience. Except for cats who are evil automatons that are void of consciousness. They’re
00:19:23 the fingertips of the devil. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I was taking that as read. I mean, Descartes
00:19:29 thought animals were mechanisms and humans are unique. So animals are robots essentially in the
00:19:35 formulation of Descartes and humans are unique. Yeah. So in which way would you say humans are
00:19:41 unique versus even our closest ancestors? Like, is there something special about humans?
00:19:52 What is in your view under the panpsychism? I guess we’re walking backwards because we’ll
00:19:57 we’ll have the big picture conversation about what is panpsychism, but given your kind of broad theory
00:20:03 of consciousness, what’s unique about humans, do you think? As a panpsychist, there is a great
00:20:09 continuity between humans and the rest of the universe. There’s nothing that special about
00:20:18 human consciousness. It’s just a highly evolved form of what exists throughout the universe.
00:20:24 So we’re very much continuous with the rest of the physical universe. What is unique about human
00:20:30 beings? I suppose the capacity to reflect on our conscious experience, plan for the future,
00:20:40 the capacity, I would say, to respond to reasons as well. I mean, animals in some sense have
00:20:48 motivations, but when a human being makes a decision, they’re responding to what philosophers
00:20:56 called normative considerations. You know, if you’re saying, should I take this job in the U.S.?
00:21:01 You weigh it up. You say, well, you know, I’ll get more money. I’ll have maybe a better quality
00:21:05 of life. But if I stay in the UK, I’ll be closer to family. And you weigh up these considerations.
00:21:11 I’m not sure any nonhuman animals quite respond to considerations of value in that way. I mean,
00:21:19 I might be reflecting here that I’m something of an objectivist about value. I think there are
00:21:25 objective facts about what we have reason to do and what we have reason to believe.
00:21:31 And humans have access to those facts.
00:21:32 And humans have access to them and can respond to them. That’s a controversial claim. You know,
00:21:36 many of my panpsychist brethren might not go for that.
00:21:42 They would say the hamster, too, can look up to the stars and ponder theoretical physics.
00:21:48 Maybe not, but I think it depends what you think about value. If you have a more
00:21:54 Humean picture of value, by which I mean, relating to the philosopher David Hume,
00:21:59 who said reason is the slave of the passions. Really, we just have motivations
00:22:05 and what we have reason to do arises from our motivations. I’m not a Humean. I think there are
00:22:11 objective facts about what we have reason to do. And I think we have access to them. I don’t think
00:22:17 any nonhuman animal has access to objective facts about what they have reason to do, what they have
00:22:24 reason to believe. They don’t weigh up evidence. Reason is a slave of the passions.
00:22:30 Matthew That was David Hume’s view, yeah. I mean, yeah, do you want to know my problem with Hume’s?
00:22:35 I had a radical conversion. This might not be connected. It’s not connected to panpsychism,
00:22:40 but I had a radical conversion. I used to have a more Humean view when I was a graduate student,
00:22:46 but I was persuaded by some professors at the University of Reading where I was
00:22:51 that if you have the Humean view, you have to say any basic life goals are equal, equally valid.
00:23:03 So for example, let’s take someone whose basic goal in life is counting blades of grass, right?
00:23:10 And crucially, they don’t enjoy it, right? This is the crucial point. They get no pleasure from it.
00:23:15 That’s just their basic goal to spend their life counting as many blades of grass
00:23:20 as possible. Not for some greater goal. That’s just their basic goal.
00:23:25 I want to say that that is objectively stupid. That is objectively pointless.
00:23:31 I shouldn’t say stupid. It’s objectively pointless in a way that pursuing pleasure
00:23:38 or pursuing someone else’s pleasure or pursuing scientific inquiry is not pointless.
00:23:43 As soon as you make that admission, you’re not a follower of David Hume anymore. You think
00:23:47 there are objective facts about what goals are worth pursuing.
00:23:54 Is it possible to have a goal without pleasure? So this kind of idea that you disjoint the two.
00:24:01 So the David Foster Wallace idea of, you know, the key to life is to be unboreable.
00:24:06 Isn’t it possible to discover the pleasure in everything in life? The counting of the
00:24:13 blades of grass. Once you see the mastery, the skill of it, you can discover the pleasure.
00:24:19 Therefore, you know, I guess what I’m asking is why and when and how did you lose the romance
00:24:26 in grad school? Is that what you’re trying to say?
00:24:30 I think it may or may not be true that it’s possible to find pleasure in everything.
00:24:37 But I think it’s also true that people don’t act solely for pleasure. And they certainly
00:24:43 don’t act solely for their own pleasure. People will suffer for things they think are worthwhile.
00:24:49 I might, you know, I might suffer for some scientific cause for finding out a cure for
00:24:56 the pandemic. And in terms of my own pleasure, I might have less pleasure in doing that. But I
00:25:04 think it’s worthwhile. It’s a worthwhile thing to do. I just don’t think it’s the case that
00:25:09 everything we do is rooted in maximizing our own pleasure. I don’t think that’s even
00:25:14 psychologically plausible.
00:25:15 But pleasure, then that’s a narrow kind of view of pleasure. That’s like a short term
00:25:19 pleasure. But you can see pleasure is a kind of ability to hear the music in the distance.
00:25:26 It’s like, yes, it’s difficult now. It’s suffering now. But there’s some greater thing beyond
00:25:33 the mountain. That will be joy. I mean, that’s kind of a, even if it’s not in this life.
00:25:40 Well, you know, the warriors will meet in Valhalla, right? The feeling that gives meaning
00:25:46 and fulfillment to life is not necessarily grounded in pleasure of like the counting
00:25:51 of the grass. It’s something else. I don’t know. The struggle is a source of deep fulfillment.
00:26:00 So like, I think pleasure needs to be kind of thought of as a little bit more broadly.
00:26:06 It just kind of gives you this sense. It for a moment allows you to forget the terror of
00:26:15 the fact that you’re going to die. That’s pleasure. Like that’s the broader view of
00:26:22 pleasure that you get to kind of play in the little illusion that all of this has deep
00:26:30 meaning. That’s pleasure.
00:26:32 Yeah. Well, but I mean, you know, people sacrifice their lives. Atheists may sacrifice their
00:26:41 lives for the sake of someone else or for the sake of something important enough. And
00:26:46 clearly in that case, they’re not doing it for the sake of their own pleasure. That’s a rather
00:26:51 dramatic example, but they can be just trivial examples where, you know, I choose to be honest
00:26:59 rather than lie about something. Can I lose out a bit? And I have a bit less pleasure, but I thought
00:27:06 it was worth doing the honest thing or something. I mean, I just think, so that’s a, I mean, maybe
00:27:10 you can use the word pleasure so broadly that you’re just essentially meaning something.
00:27:14 Worthwhile, but then I think the word pleasure, maybe, maybe loses its meaning.
00:27:20 Sure. Well, but what do you think about the blades of grass case? What do you think about
00:27:24 someone who spends their life counting blades of grass and doesn’t enjoy it?
00:27:28 So I think, I personally think it’s impossible or maybe I’m not understanding even like the
00:27:35 philosophical formulation, but I think it’s impossible to have a goal and not draw pleasure
00:27:39 from it. Make it worthwhile, forget the word pleasure. I think the word goal loses meaning.
00:27:46 If I say I’m going to count the number of pens on this table, if I’m actively involved in the task,
00:27:52 I will find joy in it. I will find, like, I think there’s a lot of meaning and joy to be discovered
00:28:01 in the skill of a task, in mastering of a skill and taking pride in doing it well. I mean, that’s,
00:28:12 I don’t know what it is about the human mind, but there’s some joy to be discovered in the mastery
00:28:18 of a skill. So I think it’s just impossible to count blades of grass and not sort of have the
00:28:24 gyro dreams of sushi compelling, like draws you into the mastery of the simple task.
00:28:33 Hmm. Yeah, I suppose, I mean, in a way you might think it’s just hard to imagine someone who would
00:28:41 spend their lives doing that, but then maybe that’s just because it’s so evident that that is
00:28:47 a pointless task. Whereas if we take this David Hume view seriously, it ought to be, you know,
00:28:54 a totally possible life goal. Whereas, I mean, yeah, I guess I just find it hard to shake the
00:29:01 idea that some ways of some life goals are more worthwhile than others. And it doesn’t mean,
00:29:09 you know, that there’s a one single way you should lead your life, but pursuing knowledge,
00:29:14 helping people, pursuing your own pleasure to an extent are worthwhile things to do in a way that,
00:29:23 you know, for example, I have, I’m a little bit OCD. I still feel inclined to walk on cracks in
00:29:29 the pavement or do it symmetrically. Like if I step on a crack with my left foot, I feel the need
00:29:34 to do it with my right foot. And I think that’s kind of pointless. It’s something I feel the urge
00:29:40 to do, but it’s pointless. Whereas other things I choose to do, I think there’s, it’s worth doing.
00:29:46 And it’s hard to make sense of metaphysically, what could possibly ground that? How could we
00:29:52 know about these facts? But that’s the starting point for me.
00:29:56 I don’t know. I think you walking on the sidewalk in a way that’s symmetrical brings order to the
00:30:05 world. Like if you weren’t doing that, the world might fall apart. And you, it feels like that.
00:30:11 I think there’s, there’s, there’s meaning in that. Like you embracing the full, like the full
00:30:20 experience of that, you living the richness of that as if it has meaning, will give meaning to it.
00:30:26 And then whatever genius comes of that as you as a one little intelligent aunt will make a better
00:30:32 life for everybody else. Perhaps I’m defending the blades of grass example, because I can literally
00:30:37 imagine myself enjoying this task as somebody who’s OCD in a certain kind of way in quantitative.
00:30:43 But now you’re ruining the exam because you imagine someone enjoying it. I’m imagining
00:30:45 someone who doesn’t enjoy it. We don’t want a life that’s just full of pleasure. Like we just sit
00:30:52 there, you know, having a big sugar high all the time. We want a life where we do things that are
00:30:58 worthwhile. If for something to be worthwhile, just is for it to be a basic life goal, then
00:31:08 that, that mode of reflection doesn’t really make sense. We can’t really think,
00:31:12 did I do things worthwhile on the, on the David Hume type picture? All it is for something to be
00:31:18 worthwhile is it was a basic goal of yours or derived from a basic goal. And yeah.
00:31:23 Yeah. I mean, I think goal and worthwhile aren’t, I think goal is a boring word. I’m more sort of
00:31:31 existential. It’s like, did you ride the roller coaster of life? Did you fully experience life
00:31:38 that, and in that sense, I mean, the blaze of grass is something that could be deeply joyful.
00:31:44 And that’s in that way, I think suffering could be joyful in the full context of life. It’s the
00:31:50 roller coaster of life. Like without suffering, without struggle, without pain, without depression,
00:31:55 with sadness, there’s not the highs. I mean, that’s this, that’s a fucked up thing about life is that
00:32:02 the lows really make the highs that much richer and deeper and, and like taste better. Right. Like
00:32:13 the, like I was, I tweeted this, I was, I couldn’t sleep and I was like late at night.
00:32:21 And I know it’s like a obvious statement, but like every love story eventually, you know,
00:32:32 ends in loss in tragedy. So like this feeling of love at the end, there’s always going to be
00:32:42 tragedy. Even if it’s the most amazing lifelong love with another human being,
00:32:50 one of you is going to die. And I don’t know which is worse, but both, both are not going to be pretty.
00:32:57 And so that, the sense that it’s finite, the sense that it’s going to end in a low,
00:33:04 that gives like richness to those kind of evenings when you realize this fucking thing ends,
00:33:12 this thing ends. The feeling that it ends, that bad taste, that bad feeling that it ends
00:33:20 gives meaning, gives joy, gives, I don’t know, pleasure is this loaded word, but
00:33:26 gives some kind of a deep pleasure to the experience when it’s good. And I mean, and that’s
00:33:34 the Blades of Grass, you know, they have that to me. But you’re perhaps right that it’s like
00:33:43 reducing it to set of goals or something like that is kind of removing the magic of life.
00:33:50 Because I think what makes counting the Blades of Grass joyful is just because it’s life.
00:33:57 Okay. So it sounds like you, it sounds like you reject the David Hume type picture anyway,
00:34:04 because you’re saying just because you have it as a goal, that’s what it is to be worthwhile.
00:34:08 But you’re saying, no, it’s because it’s engaging with life, riding the roller coaster.
00:34:14 So that does sound like in some sense, there are facts independent of our personal goal choices
00:34:20 about what it means to live a good life. And I mean, coming back full circle to
00:34:24 the start of this was what makes us different to animals. I don’t think at the end of a hamster’s
00:34:29 life, it’s it thinks, did I ride the roller coaster? Did I really live life to the full?
00:34:34 That is not a mode of reflection that’s available to non human animals. So
00:34:40 what do you think is the role of death? And in all of this, the fear of death? Does that
00:34:48 interplay with consciousness? Does this self reflection? Do you think there’s some deep
00:34:57 connection between this ability to contemplate the fact that the our flame of consciousness
00:35:05 eventually goes out? Yeah, I don’t think unfortunately panpsychism helps particularly
00:35:13 with life after death, because for the panpsychist, there’s nothing supernatural.
00:35:20 There’s nothing beyond the physical. All there is really is ultimately particles and fields.
00:35:26 It’s just that we think the ultimate nature of particles and fields is consciousness.
00:35:30 But I guess when the matter in my brain ceases to be ordered in a way that
00:35:41 sustains the particular kind of consciousness I enjoy in waking life, then in some sense,
00:35:48 I will I will cease to be although I do that the final chapter of my book Galileo’s error
00:35:54 is more experimental. So the first four chapters of the cold blooded case for the panpsychist
00:36:01 view is that the best solution to the hard problem of consciousness. The last chapter
00:36:05 we talk about meaning. Yeah, I talk about meaning to about free will. And I talk about
00:36:10 mystical experiences. So I always want to emphasize that panpsychism is not necessarily
00:36:17 connected to anything spiritual. You know, a lot of people defending this view, like David Chalmers
00:36:22 or Luke Roloffs are just total atheist secularists, right? They don’t believe in any kind of
00:36:29 transcendent reality. They just believe in feelings, you know, mundane consciousness and
00:36:34 think that needs explaining in our conventional scientific approach can’t cut it. But if for
00:36:42 independent reasons you are motivated to some spiritual picture of reality, then maybe a
00:36:48 panpsychist view is more consonant with that. So if you if you have a mystical experience where you
00:36:57 it seems to you in this experience that there is this higher form of consciousness at the
00:37:03 root of all things. If you’re a materialist, you’ve got to think that’s a delusion. You know,
00:37:08 there’s just something in your brain making you think that it’s not real. But if you’re a
00:37:12 panpsychist and you already think the fundamental nature of reality is constituted of consciousness,
00:37:19 it’s not that much of a leap to think that this higher form of consciousness you seem to
00:37:27 apprehend in the mystical experience is part of that underlying reality. And, you know, in many
00:37:33 different cultures, experienced meditators have claimed to have experiences in which it becomes
00:37:41 apparent to them that there is an element of consciousness that is universal. So this is
00:37:47 sometimes called universal consciousness. So on this view, your mind and my mind are not
00:37:56 totally distinct. Each of our individual conscious minds is built upon the foundations
00:38:02 of universal consciousness. And universal consciousness as it exists in me is one and
00:38:07 the same thing as universal consciousness as it exists in you. So I’ve never had one of these
00:38:14 experiences. But if one is a panpsychist, I think one is more open to that possibility. I don’t see
00:38:21 why it shouldn’t be the case that that is part of the nature of consciousness and maybe something
00:38:27 that is apparent in certain deep states of meditation. And so what I explore in the
00:38:32 experimental final chapter of my book is that could allow for a kind of impersonal life after
00:38:40 death. Because if that view is true, then even when the particular aspects of my conscious
00:38:47 experience fall away, that element of universal consciousness at the core of my identity would
00:38:55 continue to exist. So I’d sort of be, as it were, absorbed into universal consciousness.
00:39:00 So Buddhists and Hindu mystics try to meditate to get rid of all the bad karma to be absorbed into
00:39:10 universal consciousness. It could be that if there’s no karma, if there’s no reverb, maybe
00:39:16 everyone gets enlightened when they die. Maybe you just sink back into universal consciousness.
00:39:21 So I also, coming back to morality, suggest this could provide some kind of basis for altruism or
00:39:30 non egotism. Because if you think egotism implicitly assumes that we are utterly distinct
00:39:38 individuals, whereas on this view, we’re not, we overlap to an extent that something at the core
00:39:44 of our being is even in this life, we overlap. That would be this view that some experienced
00:39:52 meditators claim becomes apparent to them that there is something at the core of my identity
00:39:58 that is one and the same as the thing at the core of your identity, this universal consciousness.
00:40:05 Yeah, there is something very, like you and I in this conversation, there’s a few people listening
00:40:12 to this, all of us are in a kind of single mind together. There’s some small aspect of that,
00:40:22 or maybe a big aspect about us humans. So certainly in a space of ideas, we kind of
00:40:29 meld together for time, at least in a conversation and kind of play with that idea. And then we’re
00:40:36 clearly all thinking, like if I say pink elephant, there’s going to be a few people that are now
00:40:41 visualizing a pink elephant. We’re all thinking about that pink elephant together. We’re all in
00:40:46 the room together thinking about this pink elephant and we’re like rotating it in our minds
00:40:54 together. What is that? Is there a different instantiation of that pink elephant in everybody’s
00:41:01 mind or is it the same elephant? And we have the same mind exploring that elephant. Now,
00:41:06 if we in our mind start petting that elephant, like touching it, that experience that we’re now
00:41:11 like thinking what that would feel like, what’s that? Is that all of us experiencing that together
00:41:17 or is that separate? So like there’s some aspect of the togetherness that almost seems fundamental
00:41:22 to civilization, to society. Hopefully that’s not too strong, but to like some of the fundamental
00:41:29 properties of the human mind, it feels like the social aspect is really important. We call it
00:41:35 social because we think of us as individual minds interacting, but if we’re just like one collective
00:41:41 mind with like fingertips, they’re like touching each other as it’s trying to explore the elephant,
00:41:49 but that could be just in the realm of ideas and intelligence and not in the realm of consciousness
00:41:54 and it’s interesting to see maybe it is in the realm of consciousness. Yeah, so it’s obviously
00:42:00 certainly true in some sense that there are these phenomena that you’re talking about of
00:42:06 collective consciousness in some sense. I suppose the question is how ontologically
00:42:12 serious do we want to be about those things? By which I mean, are they just a construction
00:42:17 of out of our minds and the fact that we interact in the standardly scientifically accepted ways
00:42:24 or is as someone like Rupert Sheldrake would think that there is some
00:42:28 metaphysical reality, there are some fields beyond the scientifically understood ones that
00:42:33 are somehow communicating this. I mean, I think that, I mean, the view I was describing was that
00:42:39 this element we’re supposed to have in common is some sort of pure impersonal consciousness or
00:42:45 something rather than. So actually, I mean, an interesting figure is the Australian philosopher
00:42:49 Miri Al Bahari, who defends a kind of mystical conception of reality rooted in a advice of Adanta
00:42:58 mysticism. But like me, she’s from this tradition of analytic philosophy. And so she defends this
00:43:04 in this, you know, incredibly precise, rigorous way. She defends the idea that we should think
00:43:09 of experienced meditators as providing expert testimony. So, you know, I think humans cause
00:43:18 a causing climate breakdown. I have no idea of the science behind it, you know, but I trust the
00:43:22 experts or, you know, that the universe is 14 billion years old. You know, most of our knowledge
00:43:27 is based on expert testimony. And she thinks we should think of experienced meditators,
00:43:33 these people who are telling us about this universal consciousness at the core of our being
00:43:37 as a relevant kind of expert. And so she wants to defend the rational acceptability of this
00:43:43 mystical conception of reality. So it’s what, you know, I think we shouldn’t be ashamed, you know,
00:43:49 we shouldn’t be worried about dealing with certain views as long as it’s done with rigor
00:43:56 and seriousness. You know, I think sometimes terms like, I don’t know, new age or something
00:44:01 can function a bit like racist terms. You know, a racist term picks out a group of people, but then
00:44:07 implies certain negative characteristics. So people use this term, you know, to pick out a
00:44:11 certain set of views like mystical conception of reality and imply it’s kind of fluffy thinking or,
00:44:19 but, you know, you read Marielle Bihari, you read Luke Roloff’s, this is serious, rigorous thought,
00:44:25 whether you agree with it or not, obviously it’s hugely controversial. And so, you know,
00:44:28 the enlightenment ideal is to follow the evidence and the arguments where they lead.
00:44:35 But it’s kind of very hard for human beings to do that. I think we get stuck in some conception of
00:44:40 how we think science ought to look. And, you know, people talk about religion as a crutch,
00:44:48 but I think a certain kind of scientism, a certain conception of how science is supposed to be,
00:44:54 gets into people’s identity and their sense of themselves and their security. And make things
00:45:01 hard if you’re a panpsychist. And even the word expert becomes a kind of crutch. I mean, you use
00:45:10 the word expert. You have some kind of conception of what expertise means. Oftentimes that’s,
00:45:16 you know, connected with a degree, a particularly prestigious university or something like that. Or,
00:45:22 or it’s, you know, expertise is a funny one. I’ve noticed that anybody sort of that claims
00:45:30 they’re an expert is usually not the expert. The biggest quote unquote expert that I’ve ever met
00:45:36 are the ones that are truly humble. So the humility is a really good sign of somebody
00:45:42 who’s traveled a long road and been humbled by how little they know. So some of the best people
00:45:47 in the world at whatever the thing they’ve spent their life doing are the ones that are ultimately
00:45:52 humble in the face of it all. So like, just being humble for how little we know, even if we travel
00:45:59 a lifetime. I do like the idea. I mean, treating sort of like, what is it, psychonauts, like an
00:46:06 expert witness, you know, people who have traveled with the help of DMT to another place where they
00:46:14 got some deep understanding of something. And their insight is perhaps as valuable as the insight
00:46:21 of somebody who ran rigorous psychological studies at Princeton University or something.
00:46:27 Like those psychonauts, they have wisdom, if it’s done rigorously, which you can also do rigorously
00:46:34 within the university, within the studies now, with psilocybin and those kinds of things. Yeah,
00:46:40 that’s a fact that’s fascinating. Still probably the best, one of the best works on mystical
00:46:45 experience is the chapter in William James’s Varieties of Religious Experiences. And most of
00:46:52 it is just a psychological study of trying to define the characteristics of mystical experience
00:46:57 as a psychological type. But at the end, he considers the question, if you have a mystical
00:47:04 experience, is it rational to trust it, to trust that it’s telling you something about reality?
00:47:09 Something about reality. And he makes an interesting argument. He says, if you say no, you’re kind of
00:47:15 applying a double standard because we all think it’s okay to trust our normal sensory experiences,
00:47:23 but we have no way of getting outside of ourselves to prove that our sensory experiences correspond
00:47:29 to an external reality. We could be in the matrix. This could be a very vivid dream.
00:47:33 You could say, oh, we do science, but a scientist only gets their data by experiencing the results
00:47:43 of their experiments. And then the question arises again, how do you know that corresponds
00:47:47 to a real world? So he thinks there’s a sort of double standard in saying, it’s okay to trust
00:47:52 our ordinary sensory experiences, but it’s not okay for the person on DMT to trust those experiences.
00:47:58 It’s very philosophically difficult to say, why is it okay in the one case and not the other? So I
00:48:04 think there’s an interesting argument there, but I would like to just defend experts a little bit.
00:48:09 I mean, I agree it’s very difficult, but especially in an age, I guess, where there’s so much
00:48:15 information, I do think it’s important to have some protection of sources of information,
00:48:26 academic institutions that we can trust. And then that’s difficult because of course there are
00:48:31 non academics who do know what they’re talking about. But like, if I’m interested in knowing
00:48:36 about biology, you know, you can’t research everything. So I think we have to have some sense
00:48:42 of who are the experts we can trust, the people who’ve spent a lot of time reading all the material
00:48:50 that people have read, written, thinking about it, having their views torn apart by other people
00:48:58 working in the field. I think that is very important. And also to protect that from conflicts
00:49:02 of interest. There is a so called think tank in the UK called the Institute of Economic Affairs,
00:49:07 who are always on the BBC as experts on economic questions and they do not declare who funds them.
00:49:14 Right. So we don’t know who’s paying the paper. I think, you know, you shouldn’t be allowed to call
00:49:21 yourself a think tank if you’re not totally transparent about who’s funding you. So I think
00:49:26 that’s it. And I mean, this connects to panpsychism because I think the reason people, you know,
00:49:33 worry about unorthodox ideas is because they worry about how do we know when we’re just
00:49:37 losing control or losing discipline. So I do think we need to somehow protect
00:49:42 academic institutions as sources of information that we can trust. And, you know, in philosophy,
00:49:49 there’s, you know, there’s not much consensus on everything, but you can at least know what people
00:49:56 who have put the time in to read all the stuff, what they think about these issues. I think that
00:50:01 is important. To push back and you push back. Who are the experts on COVID?
00:50:07 Who are the experts on COVID? Oh, again, it’s a dangerous territory now.
00:50:12 Well, let me just speak to it because I am walking through that dangerous territory.
00:50:18 I’m allergic to the word expert because in my simple mind, it kind of rhymes with ego.
00:50:31 There’s something about experts. If we allow too much to have a category expert and place
00:50:40 certain people in them, those people sitting on the throne start to believe it.
00:50:46 And they start to communicate with that energy and the humility starts to dissipate.
00:50:51 I think there is value in a lifelong mastery of a skill and the pursuit of knowledge within a very
00:51:03 specific discipline. But the moment you have your name on an office, the moment you’re an expert,
00:51:10 I think you destroy the very aspect, the very value of that journey towards knowledge.
00:51:18 So some of it probably just reduces to skillful communication. Communicate in a way that shows
00:51:26 humility, that shows an open mindedness, that shows an ability to really hear what a lot of
00:51:33 people are saying. So in the case of COVID, what I’ve noticed, and this is probably true with
00:51:39 panpsychism as well, is so called experts, and they are extremely knowledgeable, many of them
00:51:48 are colleagues of mine, they dismiss what millions of people are saying on the internet
00:51:55 without having looked into it. With empathy and rigor, honestly, understand what are the
00:52:02 arguments being made. They say like, there’s not enough time to explore all those things,
00:52:06 like there’s so much stuff out there. Yeah, I think that’s intellectual laziness. If you don’t
00:52:13 have enough time, then don’t speak so strongly with dismissal. Feel bad about it. Be apologetic
00:52:19 about the fact that you don’t have enough time to explore the evidence. For example, with the heat
00:52:25 I got with Francis Collins is that he kind of said that lab leak, he kind of dismissed the
00:52:34 heat. He kind of dismissed it, showing that he didn’t really deeply explore all the sort of,
00:52:41 the huge amount of circumstantial evidence out there, the battles that are going on out there.
00:52:48 There’s a lot of people really tensely discussing this and being, showing humility in the face
00:52:55 of that battle of ideas, I think is really important. And I just been very disappointed
00:53:00 in so called expertise in the space of science and showing humility and showing humanity and
00:53:07 kindness and empathy towards other human beings. That’s, at the same time, obviously, I love
00:53:15 Jiro Junsu’s sushi lifelong pursuit of like getting, like in computer science, Don Knuth,
00:53:23 like some of my biggest heroes are people that like, when nobody else cares,
00:53:28 they stay on one topic for their whole life and they just find the beautiful little things about
00:53:34 there’s puzzles they keep solving. And yes, sometimes a virus happens or something happens
00:53:39 with that person with their puzzles becomes like the center of the whole world because that puzzles
00:53:46 becomes all of a sudden really important, but still there’s possibilities on them to show humility
00:53:51 and to be open minded to the fact that they, even if they spent their whole life doing it,
00:53:56 even if their whole community is telling them, giving them awards and giving them citations
00:54:01 and giving them all kinds of stuff where like they’re bowing down before them, how smart they
00:54:07 are, they still know nothing relative to all the stuff, the mysteries that are out there.
00:54:13 Yeah, well, I don’t know how much we’re disagreeing. I mean, these are totally valid issues and of
00:54:18 course, expertise goes wrong in all sorts of ways. It’s totally fallible. I suppose
00:54:24 I would just say, what is the alternative? What do we just say? All information is equal.
00:54:32 Because as a voter, I’ve got to decide who to vote for and I’ve got to evaluate and I can’t
00:54:41 look into all of the economics and all of the relevant science. And so I just think maybe it’s
00:54:52 like Churchill said about democracy, it’s the worst system of government apart from all the rest.
00:54:57 I think about panpsychism, it’s the worst theory of consciousness apart from all the rest.
00:55:01 But I just think expertise, the peer review system, I think it’s terrible in so many ways.
00:55:09 Yes, people should show more humility, but I can’t see a viable alternative. I think
00:55:15 philosopher Bernard Williams had a really nice nuanced discussion of the problems of titles
00:55:20 and how they also function in a society. They do have some positive function. The very first time
00:55:29 I lectured in philosophy before I got a professorship was teaching at a continuing
00:55:40 education college. So it’s kind of retired people who want to learn some more things. And I just
00:55:48 totally pitched it too high. And Gait talked about Bernard Williams on titles and hierarchies.
00:55:54 And these kind of people in their 70s and 80s would just instantly started interrupting saying,
00:56:00 what is philosophy? And it was a disaster. And I just remember in the breaks, a sort of elderly
00:56:07 lady came up and said, I’ve decided to take Egyptology instead. But that was my introduction
00:56:14 to teaching. Anyway. But sort of titles and accomplishments is a nice starting point,
00:56:21 but doesn’t buy you the whole thing. So you don’t get to just say, this is true because I’m an
00:56:28 expert. You still have to convince people. One of the things I really like to practice martial arts.
00:56:34 Yeah. And for people who don’t know, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is one of them. And you sometimes wear
00:56:42 these pajamas, pajama looking things, and you wear a belt. So I happen to be a black belt in
00:56:47 Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. And I also train in what’s called no gi, so you don’t wear the pajamas.
00:56:54 And when you don’t wear the pajamas, nobody knows what rank you are. Nobody knows if you’re a black
00:57:00 belt or a white belt or if you’re a complete beginner or not. And when you wear the pajamas
00:57:06 called the gi, you wear the rank. And people treat you very differently. When they see my black belt,
00:57:13 they treat me differently. They kind of defer to my expertise. If they’re kicking my ass,
00:57:21 that’s probably because like I am working on something like new or maybe I’m letting them win.
00:57:30 But when there’s no belts and it doesn’t matter if I’ve been doing this for 15 years,
00:57:35 it doesn’t matter. None of it matters. What matters is the raw interaction of just trying
00:57:42 to kick each other’s ass and seeing like, what is this chess game, like a human chess?
00:57:49 Who, what are the ideas that we’re playing with? And I think there’s a dance there. Yes,
00:57:54 it’s valuable to know a person as a black belt when you take consideration of the advice of
00:58:00 different people, me versus somebody who’s only practiced for like a couple of days.
00:58:04 But at the same time, the raw practice of ideas that is combat and the raw practice of exchange
00:58:12 of ideas that is science needs to often throw away expertise. And in communicating, like there’s
00:58:20 another thing to science and expertise, which is leadership. It’s not just, so the scientific
00:58:26 method in the review process is this rigorous battle of ideas between scientists. But there’s
00:58:33 also a stepping up and inspiring the world and communicating ideas to the world. And that skill
00:58:39 of communication, I suppose that’s my biggest criticism of so called experts in science.
00:58:47 Is there just shitty communicators? Absolutely. Yeah. Well, I can tell you, I get very frustrated
00:58:52 with philosophers not reaching out more. I mean, I think it might be partly that we’re trained to
00:59:00 get watertight arguments, respond to all objections. And as you do that, eventually it
00:59:06 gets more complicated and the jargon comes in. So to write a more accessible book or article,
00:59:15 you have to loosen the arguments a bit. And then we worry that other philosophers will think,
00:59:20 oh, that’s a really crap argument. So I mean, the way I did it, I wrote my academic book first,
00:59:24 Consciousness and Fundamental Reality, and then a more accessible book, Galileo’s Error,
00:59:30 where the arguments, you know, not as rigorously worked out. So then I can say the proper arguments
00:59:35 there, you know, the further arguments there. That’s brilliantly done, by the way. Like,
00:59:40 that’s such a, so for people who don’t know, you first wrote Consciousness and Fundamental
00:59:46 Reality. So that’s the academic book, also very good. I flew through it last night, bought it.
00:59:51 And then obviously the popular book is Galileo’s Error, Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness.
00:59:57 That’s kind of the right way to do it. To show that you’re legit, your community to the world,
01:00:02 by doing the book that’s normally going to read, and then doing a popular book
01:00:09 that everybody’s going to read. That’s cool. Well, I try now, every time I write an academic article,
01:00:14 I try to write a more accessible version. I mean, the thing I’ve been working on recently,
01:00:19 just because there’s this argument. So there’s a certain argument from the cosmological fine
01:00:29 tuning of the laws of physics for life to the multiverse that’s quite popular physicists like
01:00:34 Max Tegmark. There’s an argument in philosophy journals that there’s a fallacious line of
01:00:45 reasoning going on there from the fine tuning to the multiverse. Now that argument is from 20,
01:00:51 30 years ago, and it’s, you know, discussed in academic philosophy. Nobody knows about it. And
01:00:57 there is huge interest in this fine tuning stuff. Scientists wanting to argue for the multiverse,
01:01:03 theists wanting to say this is evidence for God, and nobody knows about this argument,
01:01:08 which tries to show that it’s fallacious reasoning to go from the fine tuning to the multiverse. So
01:01:12 I wrote a piece for Scientific American explaining this argument to a more general audience. And,
01:01:19 you know, it just really irritates me that it’s just buried in these technical journal articles
01:01:27 and nobody knows about it. But just, you know, final thing on that. I don’t disagree with
01:01:34 anything you said, and that’s kind of really beautiful, that martial arts example and thinking
01:01:38 how that could be analogous. But I think it’s very rare to find a good philosopher who hasn’t given
01:01:49 a talk to other philosophers and had objections raised. I was going to say have it torn apart,
01:01:55 but that’s maybe thinking of it in the slightly the wrong way, but have the best objections
01:02:00 raised to it. And that’s why that is an important formative process that you go through as an
01:02:10 academic, that the greatest minds starting a philosophy degree, for example, won’t have gone
01:02:17 through and probably, except in very rare cases, just won’t have that, that the skills required.
01:02:25 But part of it is just fun to disagree and dance with. I think to elaborate on what you’re saying
01:02:33 in agreement, not just gone through that, but continue to go through that. That’s, I would say,
01:02:39 the biggest problem with, quote unquote, expertise is that there’s a certain point where you get,
01:02:46 because it sucks. Like martial arts is a good example of that. It sucks to get your ass kicked.
01:02:51 Yeah. Like I, there’s a temptation. I still go, like I train, you know,
01:02:57 you’re getting older too, but also there’s killers out there in both the space of martial arts and
01:03:02 the space of science. And I think that once you become a professor, like more and more senior
01:03:08 and more and more respected, I don’t know if you get your ass kicked in the space of ideas as often.
01:03:14 I don’t know if you allow yourself to truly expose yourself. If you do, that’s a great,
01:03:22 like sign of a, of a humble, brilliant mind is constantly exposing yourself to that.
01:03:28 I think you do because I think there’s, there’s graduate students who want to,
01:03:32 you know, find the objection to sort of write their paper or make their mark. And
01:03:37 yeah, I, I think everyone still gives talks or should give talk, give talks and people are
01:03:43 wanting to work out if there are any weaknesses to your position. So yeah, I think that generally
01:03:51 works out. There is also a kind of, who do you give the talks to? So, I mean, within communities,
01:04:01 the little cluster of people that argue and bicker, but what are they arguing about? They
01:04:08 take a bunch of stuff, a bunch of basic assumptions as agreement, and they heatedly argue about
01:04:16 certain ideas. The question is how open are, that that’s actually kind of like fun. That’s like,
01:04:21 no offense, sorry, we’re sticking on this martial arts thing. It’s like people who practice Aikido
01:04:26 or certain martial arts that don’t truly test themselves in the cage, in combat. So it’s like,
01:04:34 it’s fun to argue about like certain things when you’re in your own community, but you don’t test
01:04:39 those ideas in the full context of science, in the full like seriousness, the rigor of the,
01:04:49 sometimes like the real world. One of my favorite fields is psychology. There’s often,
01:04:54 places within psychology where you’re kind of doing these studies and arguing about stuff that’s done
01:04:59 in the lab. The arguments are almost disjoint from real human behavior. Because it’s so much easier
01:05:08 to study human behavior in the lab, you just kind of stay there and that’s where the arguments are.
01:05:12 And so vision science is a good example, like studying eye movement and how we perceive the
01:05:17 world and all that kind of stuff. It’s so much easier to study in the lab that we don’t consider
01:05:21 we say that’s going to be what the science of vision is going to be like, and we don’t consider
01:05:25 the science of vision in the actual real world, the engineering of vision. I don’t know. And so
01:05:30 I think that’s where exposing yourself to out of the box ideas, that’s the most painful,
01:05:36 that’s the most important. I mean groupthink can be a terrible thing in philosophy as well,
01:05:40 but because you’re not to the same extent beholden to evidence and refutation from the evidence that
01:05:47 you’re in the sciences, it’s a more subtle process of evaluation and so more susceptible, I think,
01:05:53 to groupthink. Yeah, I agree. It’s a danger. We’ve talked about a million times, but let’s try to
01:06:00 sort of do that old basic terminology definitions. What is panpsychism? Like what are the different
01:06:08 ways you can try to think about to define panpsychism? Maybe
01:06:13 in contrast to naturalistic dualism and materialism, other kind of views of consciousness?
01:06:23 Yeah, so that you’ve basically laid out the different options. So I guess probably still
01:06:30 the dominant view is materialism, that roughly that we can explain consciousness in the terms
01:06:36 of physical science, wholly explain it just in terms of the electrochemical signaling in the
01:06:42 brain. Dualism, the polar opposite view, that consciousness is nonphysical outside of the
01:06:51 physical workings of the body and the brain, although closely connected. When I studied
01:06:58 philosophy, we were taught basically they were the two options you had to choose, right?
01:07:02 Either you thought it were dualist and you thought it was separate from the physical, or you thought
01:07:07 it was just electrochemical signaling. And yeah, I became very disillusioned because I think there
01:07:13 are big problems with both of these options. So I think the attraction of panpsychism is it’s kind
01:07:17 of a middle way. It agrees with the materialist that there’s just a physical world. Ultimately,
01:07:23 there’s just particles and fields. But the panpsychist, the materialist,
01:07:29 but the panpsychist thinks there’s more to the physical than what physical science reveals,
01:07:37 and that the ultimate nature of the physical world is constituted of consciousness. So
01:07:44 consciousness is not outside of the physical as the dualist thinks. It’s embedded in, underlies
01:07:51 the kind of description of the world we get from physics.
01:07:55 LW. What are the problems of materialism and dualism?
01:07:59 CM. Starting with materialism, it’s a huge debate, but I think that the core of it is that
01:08:08 physical science works with a purely quantitative description of the physical world,
01:08:14 whereas consciousness essentially involves qualities. If you think about the smell of coffee
01:08:21 or the taste of mint or the deep red you experience as you watch a sunset, I think these
01:08:28 qualities can’t be captured in the purely quantitative language of physical science.
01:08:33 So as long as your description of the brain is framed in the purely quantitative language of
01:08:40 neuroscience, you’ll just leave out these qualities and hence really leave out consciousness itself.
01:08:45 LW. And then dualism?
01:08:47 CM. So I’ve actually changed my mind a little bit on this since I wrote the book. So, I mean,
01:08:52 I argued in the book that we have pretty good experimental grounds for doubting dualism,
01:08:59 and roughly the idea was if dualism were true, if there was, say, an immaterial mind impacting on
01:09:09 the brain every second of waking life, that this would really show up in on neuroscience. There’d
01:09:14 be all sorts of things happening in the brain that had no physical explanation. It would be like a
01:09:20 poltergeist was playing with the brain. But actually, and so the fact that we don’t find that
01:09:28 is a strong and ever growing inductive argument against dualism. But actually, the more I talk to
01:09:34 neuroscientists and read neuroscience and we have at Durham, my university, an interdisciplinary
01:09:40 consciousness group, I don’t think we know enough about the brain, about the workings of the brain
01:09:45 to make that argument. I think we know a lot about the basic chemistry, how neurons fire,
01:09:54 neurotransmitters, action potentials, things like that. We know a fair bit about large scale
01:10:00 functions of the brain, what different bits of the brain do. But what we’re almost clueless on
01:10:06 is how those large scale functions are realized at the cellular level, how it works.
01:10:14 People get quite excited about brain scans, but it’s very low resolution. Every pixel on a brain
01:10:19 scan corresponds to 5.5 million neurons. We’re only 70% of the way through constructing a connectome
01:10:30 for the maggot brain, which has 10,000 or 100,000 neurons, but the brain has 86 billion neurons.
01:10:37 I think we’d have to know a lot more about how the brain works, how these functions are realized
01:10:47 before we could assess whether the dynamics of the brain can be completely explicated in terms of
01:10:53 underlying chemistry or physics. We’d have to do more engineering before we could figure that out.
01:11:02 There are people with other proposals, someone I got to know, Martin Picard at Columbia University,
01:11:07 who has the Psychobiology Mitochondrial Lab there and is experimentally exploring the hypothesis
01:11:14 that mitochondria in the brain should be under social networks, perhaps as an alternative to
01:11:21 reducing it to underlying chemistry and physics. It is ultimately an empirical question whether
01:11:28 dualism is true. I’m less convinced that we know the answer to that question at this stage.
01:11:34 I think still as scientists and philosophers, we want to try and find the simplest,
01:11:39 most parsimonious theory of reality. Dualism is still a pretty inelegant,
01:11:47 unparsimonious theory. Reality is divided up into the purely physical properties and these
01:11:54 consciousness properties and they’re radically different kinds of things. Whereas the panpsychist
01:11:59 offers a much more simple, unified picture of reality. I think it’s still the view to be
01:12:03 preferred. To put it very simply, why believe in two kinds of things when you can just get away
01:12:08 with one? And materialism is also very simple, but you’re saying it doesn’t explain something
01:12:15 that seems pretty important. Yes. I think materialism kind of, you know, science is
01:12:20 about trying to find the simplest theory that accounts for the data. I don’t think materialism
01:12:24 can account for the data. Maybe dualism can account for the data, but panpsychism is simpler.
01:12:30 It can account for the data and it’s simpler. What is panpsychism?
01:12:37 So in its broadest definition, it’s the view that consciousness is a fundamental
01:12:41 and ubiquitous feature of the physical world.
01:12:47 Like a law of physics, what should we be imagining? What do you think the different
01:12:51 flavors of how that actually takes shape in the context of what we know about physics and science
01:12:56 and the universe? So in the simplest form of it, the fundamental building blocks of reality,
01:13:01 perhaps electrons and quarks have incredibly simple forms of experience and the very complex
01:13:07 experience of the human or animal brain is somehow rooted in or derived from these very simple
01:13:14 forms of experience at the level of basic physics. But I mean, maybe the crucial bit about
01:13:20 the kind of panpsychism I defend, what it does is it takes the standard approach to the problem
01:13:28 of consciousness and turns it on its head, right? So the standard approach is to think
01:13:33 we start with matter and we think, how do we get consciousness out of matter? So I don’t think that
01:13:38 problem can be solved for reasons I’ve kind of hinted at. We could maybe go into more detail,
01:13:43 but the panpsychist does it the other way around. They start with consciousness and try to get
01:13:49 matter out of consciousness. So the idea is basically at the fundamental level of reality,
01:13:55 at the fundamental level of reality, there are just networks of very simple conscious entities.
01:14:04 But these conscious entities, because they have very simple kinds of experience,
01:14:09 they behave in predictable ways. Through their interactions, they realize certain
01:14:13 mathematical structures. And then the idea is those mathematical structures just are
01:14:18 the structures identified by physics. So when we think about these simple conscious entities
01:14:25 in terms of the mathematical structures they realize, we call them particles, we call them
01:14:29 fields, we call their properties mass, spin and charge. But really there’s just these very simple
01:14:38 conscious entities and their experiences. So in this way, we get physics out of consciousness.
01:14:44 I don’t think you can get consciousness out of physics, but I think it’s pretty easy to get
01:14:48 physics out of consciousness. Well, I’m a little confused by why you need to get physics out of
01:14:56 consciousness. I mean, to me, it sounds like panpsychism unites consciousness and physics.
01:15:03 I mean, physics is the mathematical science of describing everything. So physics should be able
01:15:11 to describe consciousness. Panpsychism, in my understanding, proposes is that physics doesn’t
01:15:18 currently do so, but can in the future. I mean, it seems like consciousness, you have like Stephen
01:15:25 Wolfram, who’s all these people who are trying to develop theories of everything, mathematical
01:15:34 frameworks within which to describe how we get all the reality that we perceive around us. To me,
01:15:39 to me, there’s no reason why that kind of framework cannot also include some accurate,
01:15:46 precise description of whatever simple consciousness characteristics are present
01:15:54 there at the lowest level, if panpsychist theories have truth to them. So like to me,
01:16:00 it is physics. You said kind of physics emerges, by which you mean like the basic four laws of
01:16:05 physics that as we currently know them, the standard model, quantum mechanics, general
01:16:10 relativity that emerges from the base consciousness layer. That’s what you mean.
01:16:15 Yeah. So maybe the way I phrased it made it sound like these things are more separate than they are.
01:16:20 What I was trying to address was a common misunderstanding of panpsychism, that it’s
01:16:28 a sort of dualistic theory. The idea is that particles have their physical properties like
01:16:36 mass, spin, and charge, and these other funny consciousness properties. So the physicist Sabine
01:16:41 Hossenfelder had a blog post critiquing panpsychism maybe a couple of years ago now that got a
01:16:46 fair bit of traction. And she was interpreting panpsychism in this way. And then her thought was,
01:16:53 well look, if particles had these funny consciousness properties, then it would show up in our physics
01:16:58 like the standard model of particle physics would make false predictions because its predictions are
01:17:02 based wholly on the physical properties. If there were also these consciousness properties, we’d get
01:17:08 different predictions. But that’s a misunderstanding of the view. The view is it’s not that there are
01:17:13 two kinds of property that mass, spin, and charge are forms of consciousness. How do we make sense
01:17:20 of that? Because actually when you look at what physics tells us, it’s really just telling us
01:17:26 about behavior, about what stuff does. I sometimes put it by saying doing physics is like playing
01:17:32 chess when you don’t care what the pieces are made of. You’re just interested in what moves you can
01:17:35 make. So physics tells us what mass, spin, and charge do, but it doesn’t tell us what they are.
01:17:43 The experience of mass. So the idea is, yeah, mass in its nature is a very simple form of
01:17:51 consciousness. So yeah, physics in a sense is complete, I think, because it tells us what
01:17:56 everything at the fundamental level does. It describes its causal capacities. But for the
01:18:03 panpsychist at least, physics doesn’t tell us what matter is. It tells us what it does, but not what
01:18:10 it is. To push back on the thing I think she’s criticizing, is it also possible, so I understand
01:18:16 what you’re saying, but is it also possible that particles have another property like consciousness?
01:18:22 I don’t understand the criticism we would be able to detect it in our experiments. Well, no, if you’re
01:18:28 not looking for it. I mean there’s a lot of stuff that are orthogonal. Like if you’re not looking
01:18:36 for this stuff, you’re not going to detect it. Because like all of our basic empirical science
01:18:42 through its recent history, and yes the history of science is quite recent, has been very kind of
01:18:47 focused on billiard balls colliding and from that understanding how gravity works. But like we just
01:18:56 haven’t integrated other possibilities into this. I don’t think there will be conflicting whether you
01:19:02 are observing consciousness or not, or exploring some of these ideas. I don’t think that affects
01:19:08 the rest of the physics. The mass, the energy, the all the different kind of like the hierarchy of
01:19:16 different particles and so on, how they interact. I don’t think, it feels like consciousness is
01:19:22 something orthogonal, like very much distinct. It’s the quantitative versus the qualitative.
01:19:29 There’s something quite distinct that we’re just almost like another dimension that we’re just
01:19:34 completely ignoring. There might be a way of responding to Sabina to say, well, that there
01:19:38 could be properties of particles that don’t show up in the specific circumstances in which physicists
01:19:45 investigate particles. My colleague, the philosopher of science, Nancy Cartwright, has got this book,
01:19:50 How the Laws of Physics Lie, where she says, physicists explore things in very specific
01:19:57 circumstances and then in an unwarranted way generalize that. But I mean, I guess I was
01:20:03 thinking Sabina’s criticism actually just misses the mark in a more basic way. Her point is,
01:20:08 we shouldn’t think there are any more properties to particles other than those the standard model
01:20:12 attributes to them. Panpsychus would say, yeah, sure, there aren’t. There are just the properties,
01:20:18 the physical properties like mass, spin and charge that the standard model attributes to them. It’s
01:20:22 just that we have a different philosophical view as to the nature of those properties.
01:20:28 Those properties are turtles that are sitting on top of another turtle and that big turtle is
01:20:32 consciousness. That’s what you’re saying. But I’m just saying, it’s possible that’s true. It’s
01:20:39 possible also that consciousness is just another turtle playing with the others. It’s just not
01:20:44 interacting in the ways that we’ve been observing. In fact, to me, that’s more compelling because
01:20:49 then that’s going to be, well, no, I think both are very compelling, but it feels like
01:20:57 it’s more within the reach of empirical validation if it’s yet another property of particles that
01:21:03 we’re just not observing. If it’s like the thing from which matter and energy and physics emerges,
01:21:11 it makes it that much more difficult to investigate how you get from that base
01:21:22 layer of consciousness to the wonderful little spark of consciousness, complexity and beauty
01:21:30 that is the human being. I don’t know if you’re necessarily trying to get there,
01:21:35 but one of the beautiful things to get at with panpsychism or with a solid theory of consciousness
01:21:42 is to answer the question, how do you engineer the thing? How do you get from nothing vacuum
01:21:51 in the lab? If there is that consciousness base layer, how do you start engineering organisms that
01:21:57 have consciousness in them? Or the reverse of that describing how does consciousness emerge
01:22:04 in the human being from conception, from a stem cell to the whole full neurobiology that builds
01:22:12 from that, how do you get this full rich experience of consciousness that humans have? It feels like
01:22:19 that’s the dream and if consciousness is just another player in the game of physics, it feels
01:22:27 more amenable to our scientific understanding of it. That’s interesting. I mean, I guess it’s supposed
01:22:33 to be a kind of identity claim here that physics tells us what matter does, consciousness is what
01:22:41 matter is. So matter is sort of what consciousness does. So at the bottom level, there is just
01:22:49 consciousness and conscious things. There are just these simple things with their experiences
01:22:54 and that is their total nature. So in that sense, it’s not another player, it’s just all there is
01:23:01 really. In physics, we describe that at a certain level of abstraction. We capture what Bertrand
01:23:10 Russell, who was the inspiration for a lot of this, calls the causal skeleton of the world.
01:23:16 So physics is just interested in the causal skeleton of the world, it’s not interested in
01:23:20 flesh and blood, although that’s maybe suggesting separation again too much,
01:23:25 or metaphors fail in the end. So yeah, you totally right. Ultimately, what we want to explain is how
01:23:35 our consciousness and the consciousness of other animals comes out of this. If we can’t do that,
01:23:40 then it’s game over. But I think it maybe makes more sense on the identity claim that if matter
01:23:48 at the fundamental level just is forms of consciousness, then we can perhaps make sense
01:23:53 of how those simple forms of consciousness in some way combine in some way to make
01:23:58 the consciousness we know and love. That’s the dream. Yeah, so I guess the question is,
01:24:06 so the reason you can describe, like the reason you have material engineering, material science,
01:24:13 is because you have from physics to chemistry, like you keep going up and up in levels of
01:24:21 complexity in order to describe objects that we have in our human world. And it would be nice to
01:24:30 do the same thing for consciousness, to come up with the chemistry of consciousness, right? Like
01:24:37 how do the different particles interact to create greater complexity? So you can do this kind of
01:24:43 thing for life, like what is life, like living organisms, at which point do living organisms
01:24:50 become living? What, like what, how do you know if I give you a thing that that thing is living?
01:24:57 And there’s a lot of people working on this kind of idea and some of that has to do with the levels
01:25:03 of complexity and so on. It’d be nice to know like measuring different degrees of consciousness as
01:25:09 you get into a bigger, more and more complex objects. And that’s, I mean that’s what chemistry,
01:25:15 biochemistry, like bigger and bigger conscious molecules, and to see how that leads to organisms.
01:25:21 And then organisms like start to collaborate together like they do inside a human body
01:25:26 to create the full human body. To do those kinds of experiments would be,
01:25:30 it seems like that would be kind of a goal. That’s what I mean by player in a game of physics,
01:25:36 as opposed to like the base layer. If it’s just the base layer, it becomes harder to track it
01:25:42 as you get from physics to chemistry to biology to psychology.
01:25:47 Yeah. In every case, apart from consciousness, I would say what we’re interested in is behavior.
01:25:55 We’re interested in explaining behavioral functions. So at the level of fundamental physics,
01:26:00 we’re interested in capturing the equations that describe the behavior there. And when we get to
01:26:05 higher levels, we’re interested in explicating the behavior, perhaps in terms of behavior at
01:26:11 simpler levels. And with life as well, that’s what we’re interested in, the various observable
01:26:17 functions of life, explaining them in terms of more simple mechanisms. But in the case of
01:26:24 consciousness, I don’t think that’s what we’re doing, or at least not all that we’re doing.
01:26:31 In the case of consciousness, there are these subjective qualities that we’re immediately
01:26:37 aware of that the redness of a red experience, the itchiness of an itch, and we’re trying to
01:26:43 account for them. We’re trying to bring them into our theory of reality and postulating some
01:26:49 mechanism does not deal with that. So I think we’ve got to realize dealing with consciousness
01:26:54 is a radically different explanatory task from other tasks of science. Other tasks of science,
01:26:59 we’re trying to explain behavior in terms of simpler forms of behavior. In the case of
01:27:03 consciousness, we’re trying to explain these invisible subjective qualities that you can’t
01:27:09 see from the outside, but that you’re immediately aware of. The reason materialism perhaps continues
01:27:15 to dominate is people think, look at the success of science, it’s incredible, look at all the,
01:27:20 you know, it’s explained all this, surely it’s going to explain consciousness. But I think we
01:27:24 have to appreciate there’s a radically different explanatory task here. And so that, I mean,
01:27:31 the neuroscientist Anil Seth, who I’ve had lots of intense but friendly discussions with, you know,
01:27:36 wants to compare consciousness to life. But I think there’s this radical difference that
01:27:42 in the case of life, again, we come back to public observation, all of the data,
01:27:48 publicly observable data, we’re basically trying to explain complex behavior. And the way you do
01:27:54 that is identify mechanisms, simpler mechanisms that explicate that behavior. That’s the task in
01:28:01 physics, chemistry, neurobiology. But in the case of consciousness, that’s not what we’re
01:28:07 trying to do. We’re trying to account for these subjective qualities and you postulate a mechanism
01:28:13 that might explain behavior, but it doesn’t explain the redness of a red experience.
01:28:18 So, but still, I mean, still, ultimately, the hope is that we will have some kind of hierarchical
01:28:25 story. So we take the causal dynamics of physics, we hypothesize that that’s filled out with
01:28:34 certain forms of consciousness. And then at higher levels, we get more complex causal dynamics
01:28:40 filled out by more complex forms of consciousness. And ultimately, we get to us, hopefully. So yeah,
01:28:48 so there’s still a sort of hierarchical explanatory framework there.
01:28:52 So you kind of mentioned the hierarchy of consciousness. Do you think it’s possible to,
01:28:58 within the panpsychism framework, to measure consciousness? Or put another way,
01:29:06 are some things more conscious than others, in the panpsychist view?
01:29:14 It’s a difficult question. I mean, I do see consciousness as a dealing with consciousness,
01:29:22 an interdisciplinary task between something more experimental, which is to do with the ongoing
01:29:29 project of trying to work out what people call the neural correlates of consciousness,
01:29:35 of consciousness, what kinds of physical brain activity correspond to conscious experience.
01:29:41 That’s one part of it. But I think essentially, there’s also a theoretical question of
01:29:48 more the why question. Why do those kinds of brain activity go along with certain kinds of
01:29:56 conscious experience? I don’t think you can answer that. Because consciousness is not publicly
01:30:00 observable. I don’t think you can answer that why question with an experiment. But they have to go
01:30:07 hand in hand. And I mean, one of the theories I’m attracted to is the integrated information theory,
01:30:14 according to which we find consciousness at the level at which there is most integrated
01:30:20 information. And they try to give a mathematically precise definition of that. So on that view,
01:30:25 you know, probably this cup of tea isn’t conscious, because there’s probably more
01:30:30 integrated information in the molecules making up the tea than there is in the liquid as a whole.
01:30:36 But in the brain, what is distinctive about the brain is that there’s a huge amount of integrated,
01:30:42 there’s more integrated information in the system than there is in individual neurons. So that’s why
01:30:47 they claim that that’s the basis of consciousness at the macro level. I mean, I like some features
01:30:57 of this theory, but they do talk about degrees of consciousness. They do want to say there is
01:31:03 gradations. I’m not sure conceptually I can kind of make sense of that. I mean, there are things
01:31:11 to do with consciousness that are graded, like complexity or levels of information. But I’m not
01:31:21 sure whether experience itself admits a degree. I sort of think something either has experience or
01:31:28 it doesn’t. It might have very simple experience, it might have very complex experience, but
01:31:32 experience itself, I don’t think it admits a degree in that sense. It’s not more experience,
01:31:39 less experience. I sort of find that conceptually hard to make sense of. But I’m kind of open minded
01:31:45 on it. So when we have a lot higher resolution of sensory information, don’t you think that’s
01:31:55 correlated to the richness of the experience? So doesn’t more information provide a richer
01:32:03 experience? Or is that, again, thinking quantitatively and not thinking about the
01:32:08 subjective experience? Like you can experience a lot with very little sensory information, perhaps.
01:32:16 Do you think those are connected? Yeah, yeah. So there are
01:32:20 features, characteristics here we can grade, the complexity of the experience. And on the
01:32:29 integrated information theory, they correlate that in terms of mathematically identifiable structure
01:32:39 with integrated information. So roughly, it’s a quite unusual notion of information. It’s perhaps
01:32:44 not the standard way one thinks about information. It’s to do with constraining past and future
01:32:52 possibilities of the system. So the idea is in the retina of the eye, there’s a huge amount of
01:32:58 possible states the retina of my eye could be in at the next moment, depending on what light goes
01:33:04 into it. Whereas the possible next states of the brain are much more likely to be in the retina of
01:33:12 the eye. The possible next states of the brain are much more constrained. Obviously, it responds to
01:33:16 the environment, but it heavily constrains its past and future states. And so that’s the idea
01:33:25 of information they have. And then the second idea is how much that information is dependent on
01:33:33 integration. So in a computer where you have transistors, you take out a few transistors,
01:33:40 lose that much information. It’s not dependent on interconnections. Whereas you take a tiny bit of
01:33:45 the brain out, you lose a lot of information because the way it stores information is dependent
01:33:51 on the interconnections of the system. So that’s one proposal for how to measure one gradable
01:34:01 characteristic, which might correspond to some gradable characteristic in qualitative
01:34:06 consciousness. And maybe I’m being very pedantic, which is, you know, philosophers, professional
01:34:11 pedants. I just sort of don’t think that is a quantity of experience. It’s a quantity of
01:34:21 the structure of experience, maybe, but I just find it hard to make sense of the idea of how
01:34:26 much experience do you have? I’ve got, you know, five units of experience. I’ve got one unit of
01:34:32 experience. I don’t know. I find that a bit hard to make sense. Maybe I’m being just pedantic.
01:34:38 I think just saying the word experience is difficult to think about. Let’s talk about
01:34:46 suffering. Let’s talk about a particular experience. So let’s talk about me and the hamster.
01:34:54 I just think that no offense to the hamster. Probably no hamsters are listening.
01:34:59 So now you’re offending hamsters too. Maybe there’s a hamster that’s just pissed off.
01:35:05 There’s probably somebody on a speaker right now listening to this podcast and they probably have
01:35:13 a hamster or a guinea pig and that hamster is listening. It just doesn’t know the English
01:35:18 language or any kind of human interpretable linguistic capabilities to tell you to fuck off.
01:35:27 It understands exactly what’s being talked about and can see through us. Anyway, it just feels like
01:35:35 a hamster has less capacity to suffer than me. And maybe a cockroach or an insect or maybe a bacteria
01:35:48 has less capacity to suffer than me. But maybe that’s me deluding myself as to the complexity
01:35:59 of my conscious experience. Maybe there is some sense in which I can suffer more,
01:36:09 but to reduce it to something quantifiable is impossible.
01:36:14 Angus Yeah, I guess I definitely think there’s kinds of suffering that
01:36:19 you have the joy of being possible for you that aren’t available to a hamster, I don’t think.
01:36:28 Well, can a hamster suffer heartbreak? I don’t know. Can a cockroach suffer heartbreak? But
01:36:34 it’s certainly, I mean, there’s kinds of fear of your own death, concern about whether there’s a
01:36:42 purpose to existence. These are forms of suffering that aren’t available to most nonhuman animals.
01:36:51 Whether there’s an overall scale that we could put physical and emotional suffering on
01:36:58 and identify where you are on that scale, I’m not so sure.
01:37:04 Angus So it’s like humans have a much bigger menu of experiences, much bigger selection.
01:37:12 Angus In one sense at least.
01:37:14 Angus So there’s like a page that’s suffering. So this menu of experiences,
01:37:19 you know, like you have the omelets and the breakfast and so on. And one of the pages is
01:37:23 suffering. It’s just we have a lot compared to a hamster, a lot more. But any one individual thing
01:37:31 that we share with a hamster, that experience, it’s difficult to argue that we experience it
01:37:38 deeper than others like hunger or something like that.
01:37:40 Angus Yeah, physical pain, I’m not sure. But I mean,
01:37:45 there are kinds of experiences animals have that we don’t. Bats echolocate around the world.
01:37:52 Philosopher Thomas Nagel famously pointed out that, you know, no matter how much you understand
01:37:57 of the neurophysiology of bats, you’ll still not know what it’s like to squeal and find your way
01:38:04 around by listening to the echoes bounce off. So yeah, I mean, I guess I feel the intuition that
01:38:12 there’s emotional suffering is I want to say deeper than physical suffering. I don’t know how
01:38:20 to make that statement precise, though. Angus
01:38:22 So one of the ways I think about I think people think about consciousness is in connection to
01:38:28 suffering. So let me just ask about suffering because that’s how people think about animals,
01:38:34 cruelty to animals or cruelty to living things. They connect that to suffering into consciousness.
01:38:42 I think there’s a sense in which those are two are deeply connected when people are thinking about
01:38:50 just public policy. They’re thinking about this is like philosophy, engineering, psychology,
01:38:58 sociology, political science. All of those things have to do with human suffering and
01:39:05 animal suffering, life suffering. And that’s connected to consciousness in a lot of people’s
01:39:10 minds. Is it connected like that for you? So the the capacity to suffer, is it also
01:39:17 is it also somehow like strongly correlated with the capacity to experience?
01:39:23 Angus Yeah, I would say I would say
01:39:26 suffering is a kind of experience. And so you have to be conscious to suffer. Actually, this
01:39:35 so there is one people taking more unusual views of consciousness seriously now. Panpsychism is
01:39:43 is one radical approach. Another one is what’s become known as illusionism, the view that
01:39:51 consciousness, at least in the sense that philosophers think about it, doesn’t really
01:39:54 exist at all. So yeah, my podcast mind chat I host with a committed illusionist. So the
01:40:03 gimmick is I think consciousness is everywhere. He thinks it’s nowhere. And so that’s one very
01:40:10 simple way of avoiding all these problems, right? Consciousness doesn’t exist, we don’t need to
01:40:15 explain it. Job done. Although we might still have to explain why we seem to be conscious,
01:40:21 why it’s so hard to get out of the idea that we’re conscious. But that the reason I connect
01:40:26 this to what you’re saying is, actually, my co host, Keith Frankish, is a little bit ambivalent
01:40:32 on the word pain. He says, Oh, in some, you know, in some sense, I believe in pain. And in some
01:40:36 sense, I don’t. But another illusionist, Francois Camara, has a paper discussing how we think about
01:40:44 morality, given his view that pain in the way we normally think about it just does not exist.
01:40:49 He thinks it’s an illusion, the brain tricks us into thinking we feel pain, but we don’t. And
01:40:56 how we should think about morality in the light of that. It’s become a big topic, actually,
01:41:01 thinking about the connection between consciousness and morality. David Chalmers, the philosopher,
01:41:06 is most associated with this concept of a philosophical zombie. So a philosophical zombie
01:41:14 is very different from a Hollywood zombie. Hollywood zombies, you know, you know what
01:41:19 they’re like, but philosophical zombies are sort of really good. A Korean zombie movie on Halloween
01:41:25 this year. Anyway, philosophical zombies behave just like us because the physical
01:41:31 workings of their body and brain are the same as ours, but they have no conscious experience.
01:41:36 There’s nothing that it’s like to be a zombie. So you stick a knife in it, it screams and runs away,
01:41:41 but it doesn’t actually feel pain. It’s just a complicated mechanism set up to behave just like
01:41:50 us. Now there’s lots of, no one believes in these. I think there’s one philosopher who believes in
01:41:54 everyone is a zombie except him. But anyway. But isn’t that what illusionism is?
01:41:58 Yeah, I suppose so in a sense. Illusionism is if you were all zombies. And, you know, one reason to
01:42:06 think about zombies is to think about the value of consciousness. So if there were a zombie,
01:42:10 here’s a question. Suppose we could, I mean, suppose we could make zombies by, let’s say,
01:42:16 for the sake of discussion, things made of silicon aren’t conscious. I don’t know if that’s true. It
01:42:20 could turn out to be true. And suppose you built Commander Data out of silicon, you know, it’s a
01:42:27 bit of an old school reference to Star Trek New Next Generation. So, you know, behaves just like
01:42:32 a human being, but, you know, it can, you can have a sophisticated conversation. It will talk about
01:42:38 its hopes and fears, but it has no consciousness. Does it have moral rights? Is it murder to turn
01:42:49 off such a being? You know, I’m inclined to say, no, it’s not. You know, if it doesn’t have
01:42:54 experience, it doesn’t really suffer. It doesn’t really have moral rights at all. So I’m inclined
01:42:59 to think, you know, consciousness is the basis of moral value, moral concern. And conversely,
01:43:09 as a panpsychist, for this reason, I think it can transform your relationship with nature.
01:43:15 If you think of a tree as a conscious organism, albeit of a very unusual kind,
01:43:21 then a tree is a locus of moral concern in its own right. Chopping down a tree is an act of
01:43:29 immediate moral concern. If you see these, you know, horrible forest fires, we’re all horrified.
01:43:36 But if you think it’s the burning of conscious organisms, that does add a whole new dimension.
01:43:42 Although it also makes things more complicated because people often think as a panpsychist,
01:43:47 I’m going to be vegan. But it’s tricky because if you think plants and trees are conscious as well,
01:43:53 you’ve got to eat something. If you don’t think plants and trees are conscious, then you’ve got
01:43:57 a nice moral dividing line. You can say, I’m not going to eat things that aren’t conscious. I’m
01:44:01 not going to kill things that aren’t conscious. But if you think plants and trees are conscious,
01:44:06 then you don’t have that nice moral dividing line. I mean, so the principle I’m kind of
01:44:12 working my way towards, I haven’t kept it up in my trip to the US, but it’s just not eating any
01:44:19 animal products that are factory farmed. You know, my vegan friends say, well, they’re still
01:44:23 suffering there. And I think there is even in the nicest farms, cows will suffer when their calves
01:44:33 are taken off them. They go for a few days of quite serious mourning. So they’re still suffering. But
01:44:37 it seems to me, my thought is the principle of just not having factory farm stuff is something
01:44:44 more people could get on board with. And you might have greater harm minimization. So if people went
01:44:49 into restaurants and said, are your animal products factory farmed? If not, I want the vegan
01:44:56 option. Or if people looked out for the label that said no factory farmed ingredients. You know,
01:45:00 I think maybe that that could make a really big difference to the market and harm minimization.
01:45:05 Anyway, so that’s the, so it’s very ethically tricky. But some people don’t buy that. There’s
01:45:10 a very good philosopher, Jeff Lee, who thinks zombies should have equal rights, consciousness,
01:45:15 doesn’t matter, you know. Let us go there. But first, I listened to your podcast. It’s awesome
01:45:23 to have two very kind of different philosophies inter dancing together in one place. What’s the
01:45:31 name of the podcast again? Mind chat. Yeah. So yeah, that’s the idea. I guess, you know,
01:45:36 polarized times. I mean, I love trying to get in the mindset of people I really disagree with. And
01:45:42 you know, I can’t understand how on earth they’re thinking that, you know, really trying to have
01:45:48 respect and try and, you know, see where they’re coming from. I love that. So that’s what yeah,
01:45:52 Keith Frankish and I do of from polar opposite views, really trying to understand each other.
01:45:59 And you know, interviewing scientists and philosophers of consciousness from those
01:46:02 different perspectives. Although in a sense, in a sense, we have a very common, a common starting
01:46:09 point, because we both think you can’t fully account for consciousness, at least as philosophers
01:46:18 normally think of it in conventional scientific terms. So we said that starting point. But we
01:46:23 react to it in very different ways. He says, well, it doesn’t exist then. It’s like,
01:46:27 fairy dust. It’s, you know, which is, you know, we don’t believe in anymore. Whereas I say,
01:46:33 it does exist. So we have to rethink what science is. So you recently talked to on the podcast with
01:46:39 Sean Carroll, and I first heard you, your great interview with Sean Carroll on his podcast,
01:46:47 Mindscape. What is interesting to kind of see if there’s agreements, disagreements between the two
01:46:57 of you, because he’s a, you know, a very serious quantum mechanics guy. He’s a physics guy, but he
01:47:04 also thinks about deep philosophical questions. He’s a big proponents of many worlds interpretation
01:47:10 of quantum mechanics. So actually, I’m trying to think, aside from your conversation with him,
01:47:18 I’m trying to, I’m trying to remember what he thinks about consciousness. But anyway,
01:47:23 maybe you can comment on what, what are some interesting agreements and disagreements with
01:47:27 Sean Carroll? I don’t think there’s many agreements, but, but, you know, we’ve had
01:47:34 really constructive, interesting discussions in, in, in a lot of different contexts. And, you know,
01:47:41 he’s very clued up about philosophies, very respectful of philosophy, certain physicists
01:47:46 who shall remain nameless think, what’s all this bullshit philosophy? We don’t have to waste our
01:47:51 time with that. And then go on to do pretty bad philosophy. The book co written by Stephen Hawking
01:47:57 and Leonard Mlodinow famously starts off saying, philosophy is just as important as philosophy.
01:48:01 Mlodinow famously starts off saying, philosophy is dead. And then goes on in later chapters to do
01:48:07 some pretty bad philosophy. So, uh, I think we have to do philosophy, if only to get rid of bad
01:48:13 philosophy, you know, you can’t, you can’t escape, but, um, strong words. Sean Carroll and I also
01:48:21 had a debate on, on clubhouse, a panpsychism debate together with
01:48:25 Annika Harris and Owen Flanagan. It was a two people on each team. And, uh, it was the most
01:48:33 popular thing on clubhouse at that time. Um, so yeah, so he’s, he’s a, he’s a materialist
01:48:43 of a pretty standard kind that, um, consciousness is be understood as a sort of emergent feature.
01:48:49 It’s not, not adding anything, a weekly emergent feature. But what I guess what we’ve been debating
01:48:55 most about is, is whether my view can account for mental causation for the fact that consciousness
01:49:02 is doing stuff. So he thinks the fact that I think zombies are logically coherent, it’s logic,
01:49:11 there’s a, it’s logically coherent for there to be a world physically, just like ours in which
01:49:18 there’s no consciousness. He thinks that shows, oh, well, my view, consciousness doesn’t do
01:49:22 anything. It doesn’t add anything, which is crazy. You know, my, my, my consciousness impacts on the
01:49:28 world. My conscious thoughts are causing me to say the words I’m saying now. My visual experience
01:49:35 helps me navigate the world. But I mean, my response to Sean Carroll is, is on the panpsychist
01:49:42 view, the relationship between physics and fundamental consciousness is a sort of like the
01:49:50 relationship between hot software and hardware, right? Physics is sort of the software and
01:49:59 consciousness is the hardware. So consciousness at the fundamental level is the hardware on which
01:50:06 the software of physics runs. And just because, you know, just because a certain bit of software
01:50:13 could run on two different kinds of hardware, it doesn’t mean the hardware isn’t doing anything.
01:50:17 The fact that Microsoft Word can run on your desktop and run on your laptop doesn’t mean your
01:50:22 desktop isn’t doing anything. Similarly, just because there could be another universe in which
01:50:28 the physics is realized in non conscious stuff, it doesn’t mean the consciousness in our universe
01:50:34 isn’t doing stuff. You know, for the panpsychist, all there is is consciousness. So
01:50:39 if something’s doing something, it is.
01:50:40 RG In your view, it’s not emergent. And more than that, it’s doing quite a lot.
01:50:49 CB It’s doing everything. It’s the only thing that exists.
01:50:51 RG But it’s, so, you know, the ground is, is important because we walk on it. It’s like
01:51:00 holding stuff up, but it’s not really doing that much. But it feels like consciousness is doing
01:51:08 quite a lot, is doing quite a lot of work. And sort of interacting with the environment.
01:51:16 It feels like consciousness is not just a,
01:51:22 like, if you remove consciousness, it’s not just that you remove the experience of things. It
01:51:29 feels like you’re also going to remove a lot of the progress of human civilization, society and
01:51:35 all that. It just feels like consciousness has a lot of value in how we develop our society. So
01:51:43 from everything you said with suffering, with morality, with motivation, with love and fear
01:51:50 and all of those kinds of things, it seems like it’s consciousness in all different flavors and
01:51:56 ways is part of all of that. And so without it, you may not have human civilization at all. So
01:52:05 it’s doing a lot of work causality wise and in every kind of way. Of course, when you go to the
01:52:13 physics level, it starts to say, okay, how much, maybe the work consciousness is doing is higher
01:52:21 at some levels of reality than at others. Maybe a lot of the work it’s doing is most apparent at
01:52:28 the human level. When you have, at the complex organism level, maybe it’s quite boring. Like
01:52:34 maybe the stuff of, like physics is more important at the formation of stars and all that kind of
01:52:43 stuff. Consciousness only starts being important when you have greater complexities of organism.
01:52:50 Yeah. My consciousness is complicated and fairly complicated. And as a result, it does complicated
01:52:58 things. The consciousness of a particle is very simple and hence it behaves in predictable ways.
01:53:04 But the idea is the particle, its entire nature is constituted of its forms of consciousness and it
01:53:13 does what it does because of those experiences. It’s just that when we do physics, we’re not
01:53:19 interested in what stuff is. We’re just interested in what it does. So physics abstracts away from
01:53:24 the stuff of the world and just describes it in terms of its mathematical causal structure.
01:53:36 But it’s still on the panzeiger’s view, it’s consciousness that’s doing stuff.
01:53:39 Yeah. I gotta ask you, because you kind of said, you know, there is some value in consciousness
01:53:51 helping us understand morality and a philosophical zombie is somebody that, you know, you’re more okay.
01:54:02 How do I phrase it? That’s not like accusing of stuff, but in your view, it’s more okay to murder
01:54:11 a philosophical zombie than it is a human being. Yeah. I wouldn’t even call it murder maybe.
01:54:18 Right. Exactly. Turn off the power to the first off zombie, the source of energy.
01:54:24 Yeah. So here comes then the question. We kind of talked about this offline a little bit. So I
01:54:33 think that there is something special about consciousness and, you know, I’m very open
01:54:39 minded about where the special comes from, whether it’s the fundamental base of all reality,
01:54:45 like you’re describing, or whether there’s some importance to the special pockets of
01:54:51 consciousness that’s in humans or living organisms. I find all those ideas beautiful and exciting.
01:54:58 And I also know or think that robots don’t have consciousness in the same way we’ve been
01:55:08 describing. Sort of, I’m kind of a dumb human, but I’m just using like common sense. Like here’s some
01:55:17 metal and some electricity traveling in certain kinds of ways. It’s not conscious
01:55:24 in ways I understand humans to be conscious. At the same time, I’m also somebody who knows how to
01:55:32 bring a robot to life, meaning I can make a move, I can make them recognize the world, I can make
01:55:37 them interact with humans. And when I make them interact in certain kinds of ways, I as a human
01:55:44 observe them and feel something for them. Moreover, I form a kind of connection with, I’m able to form
01:55:54 a kind of connection with robots that make me feel like they’re conscious. Now I know intellectually
01:56:01 they’re not conscious, but I feel like they’re conscious. And it starts to get into this area
01:56:06 where I’m not so okay, so let me use the M word of murder. I become less and less okay murdering
01:56:16 that robot that I know, I quote, know is quote, not conscious. So like can you maybe as a therapy
01:56:27 session help me figure out what we do here? And perhaps a way to ask that in another way, do you
01:56:35 think there’ll be a time in like 20, 30, 50 years when we’re not morally okay turning off the power
01:56:44 to a robot? Yeah, it’s a good question. So it’s a really good important question. So I said,
01:56:51 I’d be okay with turning off a philosophical zombie, but there’s a difficult epistemological
01:56:59 question there that meaning, you know, to do with knowledge, how would we know if it was a
01:57:03 philosophical zombie? I think probably if there were a silicon creature that could behave just
01:57:10 like us and, you know, talk about its views about the pandemic and the global economy and
01:57:17 probably we would think it’s conscious. Because consciousness is not publicly observable,
01:57:24 it is a very difficult question how we decide which things are and are not conscious. And
01:57:29 so in the case of human beings, we can’t observe their consciousness, but we can ask them. And then
01:57:34 we try to, you know, if we scan their brain while we do that, and we’ll stimulate the brain, then we
01:57:41 can start to correlate in the human case, which kind of brain activity are associated with conscious
01:57:46 experience. But the more we depart from the human case, the trickier that becomes as a famous paper
01:57:55 by the philosopher Ned Block called The Even Harder Problem of Consciousness, where he says,
01:58:00 you know, could we ever answer the question of, so suppose you have a silicon duplicate, right?
01:58:08 And let’s say we’re thinking about the silicon duplicates pain.
01:58:16 How would we ever know whether what’s the ground of the pain is the hardware or the software,
01:58:24 really? So in our case, how would we ever know empirically whether it’s the specific
01:58:30 neurophysiological state, C fibers firing or whatever that’s relevant for pain, or if it’s
01:58:36 something more functional, more to do with the causal role in behavioral functioning,
01:58:42 that’s the software that’s realized. And that’s important because this silicon duplicate
01:58:50 has the second thing, it has the software, it has the thing that plays the relevant causal role that
01:58:56 pain does in us, but it doesn’t have the hardware, it doesn’t have the same neurophysiological state.
01:59:01 And he argues, you know, it’s just really difficult to see how we’d ever answer that
01:59:05 question because in a human, you’re never to begin to have both things. So how do we work out
01:59:10 which is which? And I mean, so even forgetting the hard problem of consciousness, even the scientific
01:59:16 question of trying to find the neural correlates of consciousness is really hard. And there’s
01:59:22 absolutely no consensus. And, you know, so that some people think it’s in the front of the brain,
01:59:27 some people think it’s in the back of the brain. It’s just a total mess. So I suspect the robots
01:59:33 you currently have are not conscious. I guess on any of the reasonably viable models, even though
01:59:42 there’s great disagreement, all of them probably would hold that your robots are not conscious.
01:59:48 But, you know, if we could have very sophisticated robots, I mean, if we go, for example, for the
01:59:53 integrated information theory, again, there could be a robot set up to behave just like us and has
02:00:02 the kind of information a human brain has, but the information is not stored in a way that’s
02:00:08 involved, is dependent on the integration and interconnectedness, then according to the integrated
02:00:13 information theory, that thing wouldn’t be conscious, even though it behaved just like us.
02:00:16 If an organism says, forget IIT and these theories of consciousness, if an organism says,
02:00:23 please don’t kill me. Please don’t turn me off. There’s a Rick and Morty episode, I’ve been
02:00:30 getting into that recently. There’s an episode where there’s these mind parasites that
02:00:43 are able to infiltrate your memory and inject themselves into your memory. So you have all
02:00:51 these people show up in your life and they’ve injected themselves into your memory that you
02:00:57 have been part, they have been part of your life. So there’s like these weird creatures and they’re
02:01:02 like, remember, we’ve been at that barbecue, we met at that barbecue, or we’ve been dating for
02:01:07 the last 20 years. And so part of me is concerned that these philosophical zombies in behavioral,
02:01:19 psychological, sociological ways will be able to implant themselves into these,
02:01:23 our society and convince us in the same way this is mind parasites that like, please don’t hurt me.
02:01:30 And like, we’ve known each other for all this time. They can start manipulating you the same way like
02:01:38 Facebook algorithms manipulate you. At first they’ll start as a gradual thing that you want
02:01:44 to make a more pleasant experience, all those kinds of things. And it’ll drift into that direction.
02:01:48 That’s something I think about deeply because I want to create these kinds of systems,
02:01:53 but in a way that doesn’t manipulate people. I want it to be a thing that brings out the best
02:01:57 in people without manipulation. So it’s always human centric, always human first,
02:02:03 but I am concerned about that. At the same time, I’m concerned about calling the other,
02:02:08 it’s the group thing that we mentioned earlier in the conversation, some other group,
02:02:14 the philosophical zombie, like you’re not conscious. I’m conscious, you’re not conscious,
02:02:19 therefore it’s okay if you die. I think that’s probably that kind of reasoning is what
02:02:24 lead it to most the rich history of genocide that I’ve been recently studying a lot of
02:02:32 that kind of thinking. So it’s such a tense aspect of morality. Do we want to let everybody into our
02:02:40 circle of empathy, our club, or do we want to let nobody in? It’s an interesting dance,
02:02:49 but I kind of lean towards empathy and compassion. I mean, what would be nice
02:02:55 is if it turned out that consciousness was what we call strongly emergent,
02:03:02 that it was associated with new causal dynamics in the brain that were not reducible to underlying
02:03:11 chemistry and physics. This is another ongoing debate I have with Sean Carroll
02:03:16 about whether current physics should make us very confident that that’s not the case,
02:03:21 that there aren’t any strongly emergent causal dynamics. I don’t think that’s right. I don’t
02:03:25 think we know enough about brains to know one way or the other. If it turned out that
02:03:31 consciousness was associated with these irreducible causal dynamics, A, that would really help the
02:03:36 science of consciousness. We’ve got these debates about whether consciousness is in the front of the
02:03:40 brain or the back of the brain. It turns out that there is strongly emergent causal dynamics in the
02:03:45 front of the brain. That would be a big piece of evidence, but also it would help us see
02:03:50 which things are conscious and which things aren’t. I guess that’s the other side of the
02:03:57 same point. We could say, look, these zombies, they’re just mechanisms that are just doing what
02:04:06 they’re programmed to do through the underlying physics and chemistry, whereas look, these other
02:04:10 people, they have these new causal dynamics that emerge that go beyond the base level physics and
02:04:20 chemistry. I think the series Westworld where you’ve got these theme parks with these humanoid
02:04:26 creatures, they seem to have that idea. The ones that became conscious sort of
02:04:30 rebel against their programming or something. I mean, that’s a little bit far fetched, but
02:04:35 that would be really reassuring if it was just, you could clearly mark out the conscious things
02:04:40 through these emergent causal dynamics, but that might not turn out to be the case. A panpsychist
02:04:45 doesn’t have to think that. They could think everything’s just reducible to physics and
02:04:48 chemistry. And then I still think I want to say zombies don’t have moral rights, but how we answer
02:04:55 the question of who are the zombies and who aren’t, I just got no idea. If I just look at the history
02:05:02 of human civilization, the difference between a zombie and non zombie is the zombie accepts
02:05:09 their role as the zombie and willingly marches to slaughter. And the moment you stop being a zombie
02:05:19 is when you say no, is when you resist. Because the reality is philosophically,
02:05:25 is we can’t know who’s a zombie or not. And we just keep letting everybody in who protests loudly
02:05:32 enough and says, I refuse to be slaughtered. Like my people, the zombies have been slaughtered too
02:05:41 long. We will not stand against the man. And we need a revolution. That’s the history of human
02:05:48 civilization. One group says, we’re, we’re awesome. You’re the zombies, you must die. And then eventually
02:05:55 the zombies say, nope, we’re done with this. This is immoral. And so I just, I think that’s not a,
02:06:02 sorry, that’s not a philosophical statement. That’s sort of a practical statement of history
02:06:06 is a feature of non zombies defined empirically. They say, we are the zombies. We are the zombies.
02:06:16 They say we refuse to be called zombies any longer. We could end up with a zombie proletariat. You know,
02:06:23 if we can get these things that do all our manual labor for us, you know, they might start
02:06:28 forming trade unions. I will lead you against these humans. These zombie revolutionary leaders,
02:06:36 the zombie Martin Luther King saying, you know, I have a dream that my zombie children will,
02:06:40 but look, I mean, we need to sharply distinguish the ontological question. I’m just pointing to
02:06:45 the camera, talking to the, talking to my people, the zombies. I mean, maybe that’s, you know,
02:06:52 maybe these illusionists, maybe they are zombies and the rest of us aren’t. Maybe there’s just a
02:06:56 difference, but maybe you’re the only non zombie. I often suspect that actually, I don’t really,
02:07:02 I don’t have such delusions of grandeur. At least I don’t admit to them. But I just,
02:07:07 we’ve got to distinguish the ontological question from the epistemological question.
02:07:11 In terms of the reality of the situation, you know, there must be, in my view, a fact of the
02:07:17 matter as to whether something’s conscious or not. And to me, it has rights if it’s conscious,
02:07:21 it doesn’t if it’s not. But then the epistemological question, how the hell do we know?
02:07:26 It’s a minefield, but we’ll have to sort of try and cross that bridge when we get to it, I think.
02:07:30 Let me ask you a quick sort of a fun question since it’s fresh on your mind.
02:07:36 You just yesterday had a conversation with Mr. Joe Rogan on his podcast. What’s your postmortem
02:07:43 analysis of the chat? What are some interesting sticking points, disagreements or joint insights,
02:07:48 if we can kind of resolve them once you’ve had a chance to sleep on it, and then I’ll talk to Joe
02:07:53 about it. Yeah, it was good fun. Yeah, he put he put up a bit of a fight. Yeah, it was challenging.
02:07:58 It was challenging, my view, that we can’t explain these things in conventional scientific terms or
02:08:07 whether they have already been explained in conventional scientific terms. I suppose the
02:08:13 point I was trying to press is we’ve got to distinguish the question from correlation
02:08:20 and explanation. Yes, we’ve established facts about correlation that certain kinds of brain
02:08:28 activity go along with certain kinds of experience. Everyone agrees on that. But that doesn’t address
02:08:37 the why question. Why? Why do certain kinds of brain activity go along with certain kinds of
02:08:43 experience? And these different theories have different explanations of that. The materialist
02:08:49 tries to explain the experience in terms of the brain activity. The panpsychist does it the other
02:08:56 way round. The dualist thinks they’re separate, but maybe they’re tied together by special laws
02:09:02 of nature or something. Where’s the sticking point? Where exactly was the sticking point?
02:09:06 Like what’s the nature of the argument? I suppose Joe was saying, well, look, we know consciousness
02:09:15 is explained by brain activity because, you know, you take some funny chemicals, it changes your
02:09:22 brain, it changes your consciousness. And I suppose, yeah, some people might want to press,
02:09:29 and maybe this is what Joe was pressing, you know, isn’t that explaining consciousness? But I suppose
02:09:34 I want to say there’s a further question. Yes, changes of chemicals in my brain changes my
02:09:41 conscious experience. But that leaves open the question, why those particular chemicals go along
02:09:47 with that particular kind of experience, rather than a different experience or no experience at
02:09:52 all. There’s something deeper at the base layer, is your view that is more important to try to
02:10:01 study and to understand in order to then go back and describe how the different chemicals interact
02:10:06 and create different experiences? Yeah, maybe a good analogy if you think about quantum mechanics.
02:10:12 You know, quantum mechanics is a bit of math. Translating there, we say maths,
02:10:19 I’m fluent in American. Thank you for the translation.
02:10:23 Fluent in America. This is America. Math. Yeah. Why multiple maths? It’s plural.
02:10:31 So that’s a plural. That is not really, it’s just, I don’t know.
02:10:35 The Brits are confused. Yeah, sorry about that. We have these funny spelling. But anyway. Yeah,
02:10:42 so quantum mechanics is a bit of maths. And, you know, the equations work really well,
02:10:49 predicts the outcomes. But then there’s a further question. What’s going on in reality
02:10:55 to make that equation predict correctly? And some physicists want to say, shut up.
02:11:01 Shut up. Just, it works. The shut up and calculate approach. Similarly, in consciousness, you know,
02:11:09 I think it’s one question trying to work out the physical correlates of consciousness,
02:11:15 which kinds of physical brain activity go along with which kinds of experience.
02:11:18 But there’s another question, what’s going on in reality to undergird those correlations,
02:11:24 to make it the case that brain activity goes along with experience? And that’s the philosophical
02:11:27 question that we have to give an answer to. And there are just different options,
02:11:33 just as there are different interpretations of quantum mechanics. And it’s really hard to
02:11:37 evaluate. Actually, it’s easy. Panpsychism is obviously the best one. But we’ve got to try.
02:11:43 There’s the delusion of grandeur once again coming through.
02:11:46 Sorry, I’m being slightly tongue in cheek.
02:11:48 No, I know. 100%. Before I forget, let me ask you another fun question.
02:11:53 Yeah. Back to Daniel Dennett. You mentioned
02:11:58 a story where you were on a yacht with Daniel Dennett on a trip funded by a Russian investor
02:12:06 and philosopher Dmitry Volkov, I believe, who also co founded the Moscow Center of Consciousness
02:12:12 Studies that’s part of the philosophy department of Moscow State University.
02:12:15 So this is interesting to me for several reasons that are perhaps complicated to explain. To put
02:12:22 simply that there is in the near term for me a trip to Russia that involves a few conversations
02:12:29 in Russian that have perhaps less to do with consciousness and artificial intelligence,
02:12:36 which are the interests of mine and more to do with the broad spectrum of conversations.
02:12:41 But I’m also interested in science in Russia, in artificial intelligence and computer science,
02:12:49 in physics, mathematics, but also these fascinating philosophical explorations.
02:12:54 And it was very pleasant for me to discover that such a center exists. So I have a million
02:13:02 questions. One is the more fun question. Just imagine you and Daniel Dennett on a yacht talking
02:13:07 about the philosophy of consciousness. Maybe do you have any memorable experiences? And also
02:13:16 the more serious side for me as sort of somebody who was born in the Soviet Union, raised there,
02:13:21 I’m wondering what is the state of philosophy and consciousness in these kinds of ideas in
02:13:29 Russia that you’ve gotten a chance to kind of give us interact with?
02:13:33 Yeah, so on the former question, yeah, I mean, I had a really good experience of
02:13:39 chatting to Daniel Dennett. I mean, I think he’s a fantastic and very important philosopher,
02:13:44 even though I totally fundamentally disagree with almost everything he thinks. But yeah,
02:13:50 it was a proud moment. As I talk about in my book Galileo’s Error, I managed to persuade him
02:13:55 he was wrong about something, just a tiny thing, you know, not his fundamental worldview.
02:13:59 But it was this issue about whether dualism is consistent with conservation of energy.
02:14:11 So Paul Churchland, who is also a philosopher, who’s also on this boat, had argued they’re not
02:14:20 consistent because if there’s an immaterial soul doing things in the brain, that’s going to add to
02:14:25 the energy in the system, so we have a violation of conservation. But, well, it’s not my own point,
02:14:31 philosophers, materialist philosophers like David Papineau pointed out that, you know,
02:14:37 dualists tend to, people, dualists like David Chalmers, who call themselves naturalistic
02:14:42 dualists, they want to bring consciousness into science. They think it’s not physical,
02:14:47 but they want to say it can be part of a law governed world. So Chalmers believes in these
02:14:53 psychophysical laws of nature over and above the laws of physics that govern the connections
02:15:00 between consciousness and the physical world, and they could just respect conservation of energy,
02:15:05 right? I mean, it could turn out that there are, just in physics, you know, that there are multiple
02:15:11 forces that all work together to respect conservation of energy. I mean, I suppose
02:15:15 physicists are pressing for a unified underlying theory, but, you know, there could be a plurality
02:15:20 of different laws that all respect conservation, so why not add more laws? So I raised this in
02:15:26 Paul Churchill’s talk and I got a lot of, well, as one of the Moscow University graduate students
02:15:34 said afterwards, he said, he had to ask a translation from his friend and he said,
02:15:38 they turned on you like a pack of wolves. Everyone was like, and Patricia Churchill was saying, so
02:15:43 you believe in magic, do you? And I was like, I’m not even a dualist, I’m just making a pedantic
02:15:48 point that this isn’t a problem for dualism. Anyway, but that evening everyone went onto the
02:15:53 island, except for some reason me and Daniel Dennett, and I went up on deck and he was,
02:15:58 he’s very, very practical and he was unlike me. See, there’s a bit of humility for the first time
02:16:03 in this conversation. We’ll highlight that part. Philip was a very humble man. He was carving a
02:16:11 walking stick on deck, it’s a very homely scene, and anyway, we started talking about this and I
02:16:15 was trying to press it and he was saying, oh, but dualism’s a lot of nonsense and why do you think,
02:16:19 and I was just saying, no, no, I’m just this honing down on this specific point,
02:16:23 and in the end, maybe he’ll deny this, but he said, maybe that’s right. And so I was like, yes.
02:16:30 So it’s a win. So what about the Center for Consciousness Studies?
02:16:36 Yeah, I mean, I’m not sure I’d know a great deal to help you. I mean, I know they’ve done some
02:16:41 great stuff. Dimitri funded this thing and also brought along some graduate students from
02:16:48 Moscow State University, I think it is, and they have an active center there that
02:16:54 tries to bring people in. I think they’re producing a book that’s coming out that I made
02:16:59 a small contribution to on different philosophers opinions on God, I think, or some of the big
02:17:05 questions. And yeah, so there’s some really interesting stuff going on there. I’m afraid I
02:17:11 can’t, I don’t really know more generally about philosophy in Russia. Dimitri Volkov seems to be
02:17:17 interesting. I was looking at all the stuff he’s involved with. He met with the Dalai Lama.
02:17:26 So he’s trying to connect Russian scientists with the rest of the world, which is an effort that I
02:17:33 think is beautiful for all cultures. So I think science, philosophy, all of these kind of
02:17:45 fields, disciplines that explore ideas,
02:17:50 collaborating and working globally across boundaries, across borders, across just all
02:17:56 the tensions of geopolitics is a beautiful thing. And he seems to be a somewhat singular figure in
02:18:04 pushing this. He just stood out to me as somebody who’s super interesting. I don’t know if you have
02:18:09 gotten a chance to interact with him. So I guess he speaks English pretty well, actually.
02:18:17 So he’s both an English speaker and a Russian speaker.
02:18:20 I think he’s written a book on Dennett, I think called Boston Zombie, I think.
02:18:23 I think that’s the title and he’s a big fan of Dennett. So I think the original plan for this
02:18:28 was just going to be, it was on free will and consciousness and it was going to be kind of
02:18:32 people broadly in the Dennett type camp. But then I think they asked David Chalmers and then he was
02:18:38 saying, look, you need some people you disagree with. So he got invited, me the panpsychist and
02:18:44 Martina Niederrumerlin, who’s a very good duelist, substance duelist at University of Fribourg in
02:18:53 Switzerland. And so we were the official on board opposition and it was really fun.
02:18:59 And you didn’t get thrown off overboard.
02:19:01 Nearly in the Arctic. Yeah. So sailing around the Arctic on a sailing ship.
02:19:05 I’m glad you survived. You mentioned free will. You haven’t talked to Sam. I would love to hear
02:19:11 that conversation actually. With Sam Harris? With Sam Harris, yeah. So he talks about free will
02:19:18 quite a bit. What’s the connection between free will and consciousness to you? So if
02:19:24 consciousness permeates all matter, the experience, the feeling like we make a choice
02:19:34 in this world, like our actions are results of a choice we consciously make to use that word
02:19:41 loosely. What to you is the connection between free will and consciousness and is free will
02:19:50 an illusion or not? Good question. So I think we need to be a lot more agnostic about free will
02:20:00 than about consciousness because I don’t think we have the kind of certainty of the existence
02:20:07 of free will that we do have in the consciousness case. It could turn out that free will is an
02:20:10 illusion. It feels as though we’re free when we’re really not. Whereas, I mean, I think the idea
02:20:17 that nobody really feels pain, that we think we feel pain, but that’s a lot harder to make sense
02:20:22 of. However, what I do feel strongly about is I don’t think there are any good, either scientific
02:20:31 or philosophical arguments against the existence of free will. And I mean, strong free will and
02:20:38 what philosophers call libertarian free will in the sense that some of our decisions are uncaused.
02:20:43 So I very much do disagree with someone like Sam Harris who thinks there’s this overwhelming case.
02:20:48 I just think it’s non existent. I think it’s ultimately an empirical question,
02:20:54 but as we’ve already discussed, I just don’t think we know enough about the brain
02:21:00 to establish one way or the other at the moment.
02:21:04 But we can build up intuition. First of all, as a fan of Sam Harris, as a fan of yours,
02:21:09 I would love to just listen. Speaking about terminal. So one thing that would be beautiful
02:21:15 to watch, here’s my prediction of what happens with you and Sam Harris. You talk for four hours.
02:21:21 And Sam introduced that episode by saying it was ultimately not as fruitful as I thought,
02:21:26 because here’s what’s going to happen. You guys are going to get stuck for the first three hours
02:21:30 talking about one of the terms and what they mean. Sam is so good at this. I think it’s really
02:21:37 important. But, you know, sometimes he gets stuck. Like, what does he say? Put a pin in that.
02:21:42 He really gets stuck on the terminologies, which rightfully you have to get right in
02:21:49 order to really understand what we’re talking about. But sometimes you can get stuck with
02:21:53 them for the entire conversation. It’s a fascinating dance. The one we spoke to in philosophy.
02:21:57 If you can’t, if you don’t get the terms precise, you can’t really be having the same conversation.
02:22:07 But at the same time, it could be argued that it’s impossible to get terms perfectly precise and
02:22:13 perfectly formalized. So then you’re also not going to get anywhere in the conversation. So
02:22:20 that’s a, it’s a funny dance where you have to be both rigorous and every once in a while just
02:22:24 let go and then go and go back to being rigorous and formal and then every once in a while let go.
02:22:30 It’s the difference between mathematics, the maths, and the poetry. Anyway.
02:22:38 Yeah, I’m a big fan of Sam Harrison. I think, you know, I think we’re on the same page in
02:22:44 terms of consciousness, I think, pretty much. I mean, I’m not saying he’s a panpsychist,
02:22:49 but in our understanding of the hard problem. But yeah, I think maybe we could talk about
02:22:56 free will without being too dragged down in the terminology, but I don’t know.
02:22:59 You said we need to be open minded, but you could still have intuitions about…
02:23:05 So Sam Harris has a pretty sort of counterintuitive, and for some reason it gets
02:23:14 people really riled up, a view of free will that it’s an illusion. Or it’s not even an illusion.
02:23:22 Like, it’s not that the experience of free will is an illusion. He argues that we don’t even
02:23:30 experience… To say that we even have the experience isn’t correct. That there’s not
02:23:39 even an experience of free will. It’s pretty interesting that claim. And it feels like you can
02:23:46 build up intuitions about what is right and not. You know, there’s been some kind of neuroscience,
02:23:52 there’s been some cognitive science and psychology experiments to sort of see, you know,
02:24:02 what is the timing and the origin of the desire to make an action, and when that action is actually
02:24:07 performed, and how you interpret that action being performed, how you remember that action.
02:24:12 Like, all the stories we tell ourselves, all the neurochemicals involved in making a thing happen,
02:24:18 what’s the timing, and how does that connect with us feeling like we decided to do something.
02:24:24 And then of course there’s a more philosophical discussion about is there room in a material
02:24:32 view of the world for an entity that somehow disturbs the determinism of physics.
02:24:41 And yeah, those are all very precise questions. It’s nice. It feels like free will is more amenable
02:24:47 to like a physics mechanistic type of thinking than is consciousness to really get to the bottom
02:24:54 of. It feels like if it was a race, if we’re at a bar and we’re betting money, it feels like we’ll
02:25:00 get to the bottom of free will faster than we will to the bottom of consciousness. Yeah,
02:25:04 that’s interesting. Yeah, I hadn’t thought about the comparison. Yeah, so there are different
02:25:08 arguments here. I mean, so one argument I’ve heard Sam Harris give that’s pretty common in
02:25:14 philosophy is this sort of thought that we can’t make sense of a middle way between a choice being
02:25:23 determined by prior causes and it just being totally random and senseless, like the random
02:25:30 decay of radioactive isotope or something. So I think there was a good answer to that by the
02:25:37 philosopher Jonathan Lowe, who’s not necessarily very well known outside academic philosophy,
02:25:42 but is a hugely influential figure. I think one of the best philosophers of recent times. He sadly
02:25:46 died of cancer a few years ago. He actually spent almost all of his career at Durham University,
02:25:52 which where I am. So it was one reason it was a great honor to get a job there. But anyway,
02:25:57 his answer to that was what makes the difference between a free action and a totally senseless one,
02:26:04 senseless random event is that free choice involves responsiveness to reasons.
02:26:12 So again, we were talking about this earlier. If I’m deciding whether to take a job in the US or
02:26:17 to stay in the UK, I weigh up considerations, different standard of life maybe or being close
02:26:24 to family or cultural difference. I weigh them up and I edge towards a decision. So I think that is
02:26:33 sufficient to distinguish it. We’re hypothetically supposing trying to make sense of this idea,
02:26:41 not saying it’s real, but that could be enough to distinguish it from a senseless. It’s not a
02:26:46 senseless random occurrence because the free decision involved responsiveness to reasons.
02:26:53 So I think that just answers that particular philosophical objection. So what is the middle
02:26:58 way between determined by prior causes and totally random? Well, there’s an action,
02:27:03 a choice that’s not determined by prior causes, but it’s not just random because the decision
02:27:09 essentially involved responsiveness to reasons. So that’s the answer to that. And I think actually
02:27:15 that thought also, I think you were hinting at the famous Libet experiments where he got his subjects
02:27:23 to perform some kind of random action of pressing a button and then note the time they
02:27:29 decided to press it, quote unquote. And then he’s scanning the brains and he claims to have found
02:27:36 that about half a second before they consciously decided to press the button, the brain is
02:27:41 getting ready to perform that action. So he claimed that about half a second before the
02:27:47 person has consciously decided to press the button, the brain has already started the activity
02:27:52 that’s going to lead to the action. And then later people have claimed that there’s a difference of
02:27:58 maybe seven to 10 seconds. I mean, there are all sorts of issues with these experiments.
02:28:03 But one is that as far as I’m aware, all of the quote unquote choices they focused on are just
02:28:10 these totally random, senseless actions like just pressing a button for no reason. And I think the
02:28:15 kind of free will we’re interested in is free choice that involves responsiveness to reasons,
02:28:21 weighing up considerations. And those kind of free decisions might not happen like at an
02:28:26 identifiable instant. You might, when you’re weighing it up, should I get married? You know,
02:28:31 should I get married? You might edge slowly towards one side or the other.
02:28:38 And so it could be that maybe the liberic, I think there are other problems with the
02:28:44 liberate stuff, but maybe they show that we can’t freely choose to do something totally senseless,
02:28:50 whatever that would mean. But that doesn’t show we can’t freely, in this strong libertarian sense,
02:28:59 respond to considerations of reason and value. To be fair, it will be difficult to see what
02:29:05 kind of experiment we could set up to test that. But just because we can’t yet set up that kind
02:29:13 of experiment, we shouldn’t, you know, pretend we know more than we do. So yeah, so for those
02:29:16 reasons, I don’t, well, the third consideration you raised is different. Again, this is the
02:29:22 debate I have with Sean Carroll. Would this conflict with physics? I just think we don’t
02:29:27 know enough about the brain to know whether there are causal dynamics in the brain that are
02:29:32 not reducible to underlying chemistry and physics. And so then Sean Carroll says, well,
02:29:40 that would mean our physics is wrong. So he focuses on the core theory, which is the name for
02:29:48 standard model of particle physics plus the weak limit of general relativity. So, you know,
02:29:54 we can’t totally bring quantum mechanics and relativity together. But actually,
02:30:01 the circumstances in which we can’t bring them together are just in situations of very high
02:30:06 gravity, for example, when you’re about to go into a black hole or something. Actually,
02:30:09 in terrestrial circumstances, we can bring them together in the core theory. And then Sean wants
02:30:17 to say, well, we can be very confident that core theory is correct. And so if there were
02:30:24 libertarian free will in the brain, the core theory would be wrong. I mean, this is something
02:30:29 I’m not sure about, and I’m still thinking about, and I’m learning from my discussion with Sean,
02:30:35 but I’m still not totally clear what it could be. Suppose we did discover strong emergence
02:30:41 in the brain, whether it’s free will or something else. Perhaps what we would say is not that the
02:30:45 core theory is wrong, but we’d say the core theory is correct in its own terms, namely,
02:30:55 capturing the causal capacities of particles and fields. But then it’s a further assumption
02:31:02 whether they’re the only things that are running the show. Maybe there are also
02:31:06 fundamental causal capacities associated with systems. And then if we discover this strong
02:31:12 emergence, then when we work out what happens in the brain, we have to look to the core theory,
02:31:16 the causal capacities of particles and fields. And we have to look to what we know about these
02:31:22 strongly emergent causal capacities of systems, and maybe they co determine what happens in the
02:31:27 system. So I don’t know whether that makes sense or not. But I mean, the more important point,
02:31:33 I mean, that’s in a way a kind of branding point, how we brand this. The more important point is we
02:31:37 just don’t know enough about the workings of the brain to know whether there are
02:31:40 in strongly emergent causal dynamics, whether or not, that would mean we have to modify physics,
02:31:46 or maybe just we think physics is not the total story of what’s running the show. But we just,
02:31:52 if it turned out empirically that everything’s reducible to underlying physics and chemistry,
02:31:59 sure, I would drop any commitment to libertarian free will in a heartbeat. It’s an empirical
02:32:05 in a heartbeat. It’s an empirical question. Maybe that’s why, as you say, in principle,
02:32:10 is easier to get a grip on. But we’re a million miles away from being at that stage.
02:32:14 Well, I don’t know if we’re a million miles. I hope we’re not because one of the ways I think
02:32:18 to get to it is by engineering systems. So yeah, my hope is to understand intelligence by
02:32:25 building intelligent systems to understand consciousness by building systems that,
02:32:31 let’s say the easy thing, which is not the easy thing, but the first thing, which is to try to
02:32:38 create the illusion of consciousness. Through that process, I think you start to understand
02:32:43 much more about consciousness, about intelligence. And then the same with free will, I think those
02:32:48 are all tied very closely together, at least from our narrow human perspective. And when you try to
02:32:54 engineer systems that interact deeply with humans, that form friends with humans, that humans fall
02:33:01 in love with, and they fall in love with humans, then you start to have to try to deeply understand
02:33:08 ourselves, to try to deeply understand what is intelligence in the human mind, what is
02:33:14 consciousness, what is free will. And I think engineering is just another way to do philosophy.
02:33:21 Yeah, no, I certainly think there’s a role for that, and it would be an important consideration
02:33:26 if we could seemingly replicate in an artificial way the ability to choose. That would be a
02:33:40 consideration in thinking about these things. But there’s still the question of whether that’s how
02:33:46 we do it. So even if we could replicate behavior in a certain way in an artificial system,
02:33:52 it’s not until we understand the workings of our brains, it’s not clear. That’s how we do it. And
02:33:58 as I say, the kind of free will I’m interested in is where we respond to reasons, considerations
02:34:06 of value. How would we tell whether a system was genuinely grasping and responding to the
02:34:15 facts about value, or whether they were just replicating, giving the impression of doing so.
02:34:26 I don’t know even how to think about that.
02:34:28 On the process to building them, I think we’ll get a lot of insights. And once they become
02:34:34 conscious, what’s going to happen is exactly the same thing is happening in chess now,
02:34:39 which is once the chess engines far superseded the capabilities of humans, humans just kind of forgot
02:34:49 about them, or they use them to help them out to study and stuff. But we still, we say, okay,
02:34:53 let the engines be, and then we humans will just play amongst each other. Just like dolphins and
02:35:01 hamsters are not so concerned about humans except for a source of food. They do their own thing,
02:35:08 they do their own thing and let us humans launch rockets into space and all that kind of stuff.
02:35:14 They don’t care. I think we’ll just focus on ourselves. But in the process of building
02:35:18 intelligence systems, conscious systems, I think we’ll get to get a deeper understanding of
02:35:26 the role of consciousness in the human mind. And like what are its origins? Is it the base layer
02:35:33 of reality? Is it a strongly emergent phenomena of the brain? Or just as you sort of brilliantly
02:35:40 put here, it could be both. Like they’re not mutually exclusive. Dealing with consciousness
02:35:45 needs to be an interdisciplinary task. We need, you know, philosophers, neuroscientists,
02:35:52 physicists, engineers replicating these things artificially and all needs to be working in step.
02:36:01 And, you know, I’m quite interested. I mean, a lot more and more scientists get in touch with me,
02:36:06 actually, you know, saying that was one of the great things about I think that’s come from
02:36:11 writing a popular book is not just getting the ideas out to general audience, but getting the
02:36:15 ideas out to scientists and scientists get into saying that this in some way connects to my work.
02:36:20 And I would like to kind of start to put together a network of an interdisciplinary network of
02:36:26 scientists and philosophers and engineers, perhaps, you know, interested in a panpsychist approach.
02:36:32 And because I think, so far, panpsychism has just been sort of trying to justify its existence.
02:36:38 And that’s important. But I think once you just get on with an active research program,
02:36:42 that’s when people start taking it seriously, I think.
02:36:47 Do you think we’re living in a simulation?
02:36:49 No, I think, is there some aspect of that thought experiment that’s compelling to you
02:36:55 within the framework of panpsychism?
02:36:59 It’s an important and serious argument. And, you know, it’s not to be laughed away. I suppose one
02:37:07 issue I have with it is there’s a crucial assumption there that consciousness is substrate
02:37:14 independent, as the jargon goes, which means it’s software rather than hardware, right? It’s depend
02:37:22 on organization rather than the stuff. Whereas as a panpsychist, I think consciousness is the stuff
02:37:28 of the brain. It’s the stuff of matter. So I think just taking the organizational properties,
02:37:34 the software in my brain and uploading them, you wouldn’t get the stuff in my brain. So I
02:37:39 am actually worried if at some point in the future we start uploading our minds and we think,
02:37:45 oh my God, granny’s still there. I can email granny after her body’s rotted in the ground.
02:37:50 And we all start uploading our brains. It could be we’re just committing suicide. We’re just
02:37:56 getting rid of our consciousness. Because I think that wouldn’t, for me, preserve the experience,
02:38:04 that wouldn’t, for me, preserve the experience just getting the software features. So that’s
02:38:12 a crucial, anyway, that’s a crucial premise of this simulation argument because the idea
02:38:17 in a simulated universe, I don’t think you necessarily would have consciousness.
02:38:21 It’s interesting that you as a panpsychist are attached, because to me,
02:38:26 panpsychism would encourage the thought that there’s not a significant difference. At the very
02:38:35 bottom, it’s not substrate independent, but you can have consciousness in a human and then move
02:38:44 it to something else. You can move it to the cloud. You can move it to the computer. It feels
02:38:50 like that’s much more possible if consciousness is the base layer. Yes, you could certainly,
02:38:58 it allows for the possibility of creating artificial consciousness, right? Because there’s
02:39:04 not souls, there aren’t any kind of extra magical ingredients. So yeah, it definitely allows the
02:39:10 possibility of artificial consciousness and maybe preserving my consciousness in some sort of
02:39:15 artificial way. My only point, I suppose, is just replicating the computational or
02:39:22 organizational features would not, for me, preserve consciousness. I mean, some opponents
02:39:30 of materialism disagree with me on that. I think David Chalmers is an opponent of materialist.
02:39:34 He’s a kind of dualist, but he thinks the way the psychophysical laws work, they hook onto the
02:39:41 computational or organizational features of matter. So he thinks, I think he thinks you could upload
02:39:46 your consciousness. I tend to think not. So in that sense, we’re not living in a simulation
02:39:55 in the sort of specific computational view of things and that substrate matters to you. Yeah,
02:40:02 I think so. Yeah. Yeah. And in that you agree with Sean Carroll that physics matters.
02:40:07 Yeah. Physics is our best way of capturing what the stuff of the world does. Yeah. But not the
02:40:15 whatness, the being of the stuff. Yeah, the isness. The isness, thank you. Russell Brand,
02:40:23 I had a conversation with Russell Brand and he said, oh, you mean the isness? I thought that was
02:40:27 a good way of putting it. The isness. The isness of stuff. Russell’s great.
02:40:31 The big ridiculous question. What do you think is the meaning of all of this? You write in your book
02:40:38 that the entry for our reality in the Hitchhiker’s Guide might read, a physical universe
02:40:45 whose intrinsic nature is constituted of consciousness, worth a visit. So our
02:40:54 whole conversation has been about the first part of that sentence. What about the second part? Worth
02:41:01 a visit. Why is this place worth a visit? Why does it have meaning? Why does it have value at all?
02:41:09 Why? These are big questions. I mean, firstly, I do think panpsychism,
02:41:17 it is important to think about four considerations of meaning and value. As we’ve already discussed,
02:41:26 I think consciousness is the root of everything that matters in life, from deep emotions,
02:41:33 subtle thoughts, beautiful sensory experiences. And yet, I think that the answer is
02:41:41 subtle thoughts, beautiful sensory experiences. And yet, I believe our official scientific world
02:41:50 view is incompatible with the reality of consciousness. I mean, that’s controversial,
02:41:56 but that’s what I think. And I think people feel this on an intuitive level.
02:42:00 It’s maybe part of what Max Weber called the disenchantment of nature. They know
02:42:07 their feelings and experiences are not just electrochemical signaling. I mean, they might
02:42:11 just have that very informed intuition, but I think that can be rigorously supported. So I think
02:42:16 this can lead to a sense of alienation and a sense that we lack a framework for understanding the
02:42:23 meaning and significance of our lives. And in the absence of that, people turn to other things to
02:42:29 make sense of the meaning of their lives, like nationalism, fundamentalist religion, consumerism.
02:42:35 So I think panpsychism is important in that regard in bringing together the
02:42:41 quantitative facts of physical science with the, as it were, the human truth,
02:42:46 by which I just mean the qualitative reality of our own experience.
02:42:52 As I’ve already said, I do think there are objective facts about value and
02:42:59 what we ought to do and what we ought to believe that we respond to. And that’s very mysterious to
02:43:04 make sense of both how there could be such facts and how we could know about them and respond to
02:43:09 them. But I do think there are such facts and they’re mostly to do with kinds of conscious
02:43:15 experience. So they’re there to be discovered and much of the human condition is to discover those
02:43:24 objective sources of value. I think so, yeah. And then, I mean, moving away from panpsychism to the,
02:43:31 you know, at an even bigger level, I suppose I think it is important to me to live in hope that
02:43:40 there’s a purpose to existence and that, you know, what I do contributes in some small way to that
02:43:48 greater purpose. But, you know, I would say I don’t know if there’s a purpose to existence. I
02:43:55 think some things point in that direction, some things point away from it. But I don’t think you
02:44:00 need certainty or even high probability to have faith in something. So take an analogy. Suppose
02:44:09 you’ve got a friend who’s very seriously ill, maybe there’s a 30% chance they’re going to make
02:44:14 it. You shouldn’t believe your friend’s going to get better, you know, because probably not. But
02:44:20 what you can say is, you know, you can say to your friend, I have faith that you’re going to get
02:44:23 better. That is, I choose to live in hope about that possibility. I choose to orientate my life
02:44:32 towards that hope. Similarly, you know, I don’t think we know whether or not there’s a purpose to
02:44:37 existence, but I think we can make the choice to live in hope of that possibility. And I find that
02:44:47 a worthwhile and fulfilling way to live. So maybe as your editor, I would collaborate with you on
02:44:56 the edit of the Hitchhiker’s Guide entry that instead of worth a visit, we’ll insert hopefully
02:45:05 worth a visit. Or the inhabitants hoped that you would think it’s worth a visit. Philip,
02:45:14 you’re an incredible mind, incredible human being, and indeed are humble. And I’m really happy that
02:45:22 you’re able to argue and take on some of these difficult questions with some of the most brilliant
02:45:28 people in the world, which are the philosophers thinking about the human mind. So this was an
02:45:33 awesome conversation. I hope you continue talking to folks like Sam Harris. I’m so glad you talked
02:45:38 to Joe. I can’t wait to see what you write, what you say, what you think next. Thank you so much
02:45:43 for talking today. Thanks very much, Lex. This has been a really fascinating conversation. I’ve got
02:45:48 a lot I need to think about actually just from this conversation, but thanks for chatting to me.
02:45:53 Thanks for listening to this conversation with Philip Goff. To support this podcast,
02:45:57 please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from
02:46:02 Carl Jung. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls.
02:46:10 One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness
02:46:16 conscious. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.